Team Spotlight: Dr. Ludmila Moraes, Product Development Scientist | TechSupport
“BioChain is uniquely positioned to listen to that specific need and generate a solution in collaboration with the client. We can develop a new kit to address their exact requirements. It’s something that I believe really differentiates us from our competitors, and something that our partners appreciate.” – Ludmila Moraes, Ph.D.
Dr. Ludmila Moraes has a Master’s degree in endodontology and a Ph.D. in biological sciences from Federal University in Rio Grande del Sul, Brazil. After working as a dentist in Brazil for sixteen years, she moved to the United States and earned her M.B.A. certification from the University of California, San Diego. During her first years in the United States, amidst the demands of the COVID-19 pandemic, she applied her expertise as a volunteer in PCR startups. She was eventually approached to work full-time as a research scientist, and, building on her graduate studies in molecular biology, she has been working as an application and product development scientist at BioChain Institute, Inc. since 2022. Her current work and expertise focus on the quality improvement and expansion of BioChain’s reagent and extraction kits for RNA and DNA and their application in spatial transcriptomics.
Dr. Moraes, your scientific background is quite extensive. Can you please tell me a little bit about what your current work as a Product Development Scientist looks like?
Dr. Moraes: My role has evolved a lot since I began with BioChain – I was originally an application scientist, and now I'm more focused on the company’s research and development work as a whole. A large part of my current work involves developing, updating, and improving BioChain’s existing reagent kits for nucleic acid extraction and purification. Parallel to this, my role is also client-facing: I do product improvement and quality improvement in the context of managing specific client needs and asks—as well as Technical Support.
I am currently working on improving our existing DNA & RNA FFPE extraction kit. Our goal is to achieve the highest standards with these challenging sample types. We have already observed a significant enhancement in RNA yield, surpassing our primary competitor. Additionally, my goal is to revise and improve all our kits, as well as develop customized kits tailored to specific needs.
What has your work at BioChain meant to you?
Dr. Moraes: I love a good challenge, and from the beginning, there was a lot of adapting and evolving to meet new needs while leveraging my existing expertise. My work here has included molecular biology research, client management, and even technical support when it is needed, and I have loved all of the ways I have grown as a result.
What are some of the projects or initiatives BioChain is working on that you are excited about?
Dr. Moraes: Until recently, BioChain has been mainly well-known for our tissue products and control products, such as control DNA and RNA. We have this great need and this great capacity to expand our services into spatial transcriptomics, and hand-in-hand with that is the expansion of our extraction and reagent kits. You see, nucleic acid extraction is a method that's been around for a long time now, but it’s just constantly evolving. The most recent application of it has been in spatial biology or spatial transcriptomics. It’s this brand-new technology using an extraction process that’s been around forever – but needs to be adapted to meet the complexities of its new applications.
In this context, I have had the opportunity to work with one of our clients at the University of California in Los Angeles on refining our RNA extraction process. The client requested automated RNA extraction from PAXgene tubes without using the entire volume of the tube. We successfully delivered exactly what they asked for, even optimizing the protocol by skipping steps such as PK treatment. This adjustment significantly reduces hands-on labor time while maintaining high-quality RNA extraction. I always enjoy working on our DNA and RNA extraction kits as they present unique challenges in achieving clean, high-quality results.
As for future projects, my next big goal is to develop an RNA extraction kit for blood plasma. Refining the extraction process is especially important for oncology research because you need to check for biomarkers. You can check for these through blood plasma, but to actually track a patient’s improvement or reaction to a treatment, you need to extract very high quality RNA from that plasma. The biomarkers from the RNA on plasma would tell us what cancer stage the patient is in or how he or she is responding to a novel treatment.
To me, this is incredibly exciting and important work, not just for cancer research but for medicine in general.
You mentioned your partnership with UCLA; what are some ways BioChain collaborates with its scientific partners and clients to further research?
Dr. Moraes: BioChain has been in the market for a long time, like I said, we are generally well known for pathology work and our tissue samples, both frozen and FFPE. Because of that, we have a number of well-established clients and partnerships, and so now that we are expanding our services and offering these new innovations in spatial biology and our extraction kits, we have the great opportunity of collaborating with this existing client and partner base – they know they can trust our ideas and vision.
The other side to this is the way we can innovate by listening to our clients’ needs. Our clients know that because we are a smaller company, we are more flexible and more capable of honing in on that optimization and quality improvement work and offering customization for the products we carry. We can collaborate with them directly on any pain points they have.
For example, when you’re working with blood samples in the lab, and realize that to achieve your goals you need to combine two different kits. BioChain is uniquely positioned to listen to that specific need and generate a solution in collaboration with the client. We can develop a new kit to address their exact requirements. It’s something that I believe really differentiates us from our competitors, and something that our partners are aware of.
You’ve mentioned the importance of developing and evolving BioChain’s extraction kits a number of times. Why is it important for BioChain to develop a gold-standard line of kits?
Dr. Moraes: Let’s say that you are studying two patients with the same type of cancer in the same organ. Their tumors are at the same stage of development, but they respond to chemotherapy differently. Using spatial transcriptomics, we can capture a much more detailed and accurate picture of why this is than ever before. It’s revolutionary in a lot of ways. But in order to conduct that spatial analysis, we need extremely high-quality DNA and RNA; that’s why our kits are held to such a high standard.
Technology in our line of work evolves at a truly breakneck pace. We want to ensure that our kits are always keeping up with that pace and are ready to evolve or expand as needed. This is the only way we can maintain the high quality that is so necessary in this precise line of research. The quality of DNA and RNA required to conduct spatial analysis is at a whole other level compared to previous techniques like PCR or next-generation sequencing.
You’ve talked a bit about the capabilities of spatial biology, and the role of BioChain’s extraction kits in that work. What other kinds of insights can be derived from spatial using your kits?
Dr. Moraes: The quality of RNA extracted by our kits helps to better understand what is needed for spatial analysis as compared to other methods of analysis. For example, we’ve come to realize that when conducting spatial analysis, the yield or concentration of the RNA is as important as its DV200. Basically it’s a matter of capturing as much detail as possible so we can explore and learn new things with confidence.
Dr. Moraes, thank you for sharing these rich observations with us. To conclude, can you please tell us what BioChain's 30th anniversary means to you?
Contact BioChain today to get started on your project.
Dr. Moraes: To me it is a sign of resilience. We have survived economic crises, a pandemic, and many many evolutions of biotechnology and research, and we have managed to adjust and grow accordingly. And I think the reason for that resilience is the people; every person I have worked with at BioChain has been so accommodating and collaborative.
The different teams – research and development, production, all the spatial genomics people – are very cross-collaborative and everyone is willing to show you the ropes and help you grow when you are faced with a new challenge. There is really a culture of helpfulness and helping each other grow that I am thankful for.
Thank you so much for sharing your insights and BioChain journey with us today; it was a pleasure speaking with you.
Dr. Moraes: The pleasure was all mine!
