Richard Drake, Ph.D.

I am currently a Professor in the Department of Cell and Molecular Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) and SmartState Endowed Chair in Proteomics. I also serve as Director of the MUSC Proteomics Center, a mass spectrometry-centric facility that maintains high-resolution electrospray ionization and MALDI-TOF mass spectrometers. This Center is also supported by a NIDDK Digestive Disease Research Core Center grant, and my laboratory is a member of the NCI Alliance of Glycobiologists for Cancer Research program. I currently serve as the President of the Imaging Mass Spectrometry Society, a growing group of academic and industrial investigators that promote use and development of mass spectrometry-based imaging applications. I am an experienced protein biochemist and glycobiologist, with particular expertise in tumor biology and biomarker discovery from clinical fluids and tissues. My primary research focus is in identifying glycoproteins, glycans, and glycolipids in the tumor microenvironment using human clinical tissues. My laboratory developed the founding MALDI imaging mass spectrometry methodology to allow researchers worldwide to access N-glycosylation from the tissue microenvironment in both formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded and frozen tissues. The glycan tissue maps are serving as guides to target tumor-localized glycoprotein targets for proteomic analysis, as well as providing molecular determinants for histopathology applications.