Dr Paul Trim

Dr Trim has over 10 years post-doctoral experience in developing highly effective analytical methods for quantifying challenging analytes in clinical samples. He manages Metabolomics and MS Imaging activities in SAHMRI’s Mass Spectrometry Core Facility. Despite working in a core facility environment he’s maintained an excellent publication track record through his highly collaborative approach. Despite more limited opportunities to publish in a core facility environment he has published many peer review articles including one book chapter, all focusing on small molecule analysis using mass spectrometry. Dr Trim has continued an upward trajectory publishing 19 of his peer reviewed articles in the last 5-years. He has worked extensively in the areas of MS Imaging, lipidomics and quantification of endogenous biomolecules and is one of the pioneers of combining MS imaging with ion mobility separation. He has developed a number of quantitative LC-MS/MS assays for the analysis of glycosaminoglycans, a highly challenging group of compounds. These methods enabled the first truly quantitative LC-MS/MS assay to be developed, with a 70 fold increase in sensitivity over the previously published methods.

Dr Trim’s success in developing clinically relevant methods is his work in imaging the spatial distribution of lipids in prostate cancer biopsies. This work uses MALDI MS-imaging and is enabling an understanding of the lipidomic changes beyond the information available from studying homogenised samples. Dr Trim is very adept at working with newly released technology that is not fully commercialised requiring a great deal of technical creativity. During his PhD Dr Trim authored the first publication using a novel MALDI ion mobility mass spectrometer for the imaging analysis of the small molecule chemotherapeutic, vinblastine, directly from whole body tissue sections. He also modified an existing MALDI mass spectrometer through the addition of a 20KHz variable repetition rate laser system demonstrating high speed raster imaging, reducing sampling time from many hours to 37mins without reduction in resolution. Dr Trim was awarded The Laskowski Memorial Prize for Excellence in PhD Research for his thesis entitled MALDI-MS imaging for direct drug distribution analysis.