International Collaboration: Dr. David Fabregat Safont Visits the Fernández Lab

This summer, Dr. David Fabregat Safont, a Sara Borrell postdoctoral fellow with the LIMA–Applied Metabolomics Research Group at the Hospital del Mar Research Institute in Barcelona and a collaborator with the Research Institute for Pesticides and Water (IUPA) at Universitat Jaume I, spent several weeks as a visiting researcher in the Fernández Lab at Georgia Tech.

During his stay, Dr. Fabregat Safont worked alongside lab members Eric Gier, David Lewis, and Maggie Kim to advance a new reactive DESI project aimed at improving mass spectrometry imaging of carbonyl-containing metabolites in tissue. The team tested chemical derivatization strategies and spray-based sample preparation methods to better detect compounds such as Krebs cycle intermediates, ketone bodies, and related aldehydes and ketones directly from tissue sections, work that also involved troubleshooting and instrument diagnostics on the lab's ion mobility and triple quadrupole platforms.

The visit coincided with welcome news for the group's broader international partnership: the AminoSign project, a multi-year study of amino acid-based molecular signatures in gastric cancer that includes Prof. Facundo Fernández as a collaborator, received provisional approval for three years of funding from Spain's State Research Agency (AEI) under its 2025 Knowledge Generation Projects call.

The visit reflects the Fernández Lab's continued collaboration with research groups in Barcelona, Spain, in the areas of mass spectrometry imaging and metabolomics.