The School of Pharmacy’s Drug Discovery and Metabolomics LC-MS/MS shared instrumentation resource facility was established by Professor William Gutheil, Ph.D.

The facility uses liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry to distinguish small molecules, including complex mixtures of metabolic products. The facility assists with groundbreaking research into novel antibiotics and helps identify molecules that may be biomarkers for the diagnosis of disease and its progression. The use of this advanced instrumentation, and the computational methods surrounding the data analysis it requires, saves enormous time compared to methods used even a decade ago.

Part of the School of Pharmacy and Gutheil’s mission is to train student scientists to use the Drug Discovery and Metabolomics facility and teach them how to design experiments and methodologies. Currently, two students work to support the facility and, each year, many more are trained to run their own experiments with the instrumentation.

Because of Gutheil’s training, these students can go into industry or academia as the next generation of experienced researchers, working to develop new methods, new drugs and, in some cases, new instruments.

Gutheil is a renowned expert in his field of work and is involved with the American Chemical Society Kansas City Section. There, he helps link together many of the regional assets in chemistry. Gutheil earned his Ph.D. at the University of Southern California, and completed two postdocs at Harvard Medical School and Tufts University in Boston.