28 January 2015: Department of Pharmacology, Oxford University.

“Taking a closer look at vitamin B12”, delivered by CNBP researcher Dr Georgios Tsiminis and  co-author Dr Joanna Brooks from the ARC Centre for Research on Ageing, Health and Wellbeing at the Australian National University.

The talk gave an overview on the potential for using Raman spectroscopy as a minimally invasive tool to measure and track vitamin B12 levels in humans. Vitamin B12 deficiency has been identified as a potential modifiable risk factor for dementia and Alzheimer’s disease in later life and is also the mechanism through which pernicious anaemia affects humans (vitamin B12 does not get absorbed through food due to lack of intrinsic factor). Current techniques for measuring vitamin B12 in humans, such as microbial growth and ELISAs, are both resource- and time-consuming, resulting in the general population not being regularly tested for vitamin B12 deficiency. Our aim is to produce a portable device that can measure vitamin B12 and its associated chemical compounds in a reproducible, reliable, fast and minimally-invasive manor. In this talk we explained the basic principles of Raman spectroscopy and showed some initial results that generated great interest at Oxford, who have asked us to keep them up to date with future developments on our work.

To find out a bit more about this presentation see Martyn Hooper’s Blog post “the Blog from  he chair of the Pernicious Anaemia Society.