Back in his assistant professor days in the 1990s, Mitsutoshi Setou was looking for a company to fund and commercialize his ideas. Setou, who is now a full professor at the Mitsubishi Kagaku Institute of Life Sciences in Tokyo, wanted to exploit nanoparticles to improve the resolution of mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) — an analytical technique that is used to visualize the spatial distribution of compounds. Only one person took the proposal seriously, but luckily for Setou that person was Shigehiko Hattori, the president of the Japanese equipment company Shimadzu. Part of the problem might have been Setou's relative youth — he was 33 at the time, whereas most team leaders in Japan tend to be 55 or older.

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Ionizing samples is a central part of MSI, and Setou — working with Yuko Ichiyanagi, a physicist at Yokohama National University, and others — has recently developed silicon dioxide-based nanoparticles with hydrophilic groups on their surface to assist with this process when studying mammalian tissue specimens. Traditional reagents based on organic solutions form large crystals when sprayed on the specimens and this decreases the imaging resolution. Setou's nanoparticles — which have a diameter of just 3.7 nm across — do not suffer from this problem (Anal. Chem. 80, 4761–4766; 2008).

“Letting biologists, physicists and chemists understand nanotechnology-based MSI is a possible, meaningful and fruitful mission,” says Setou. “Everyone was sceptical at the beginning and changing everyone's way of thinking was most difficult but also most rewarding.” What advice does he have for others facing similar challenges? “We need to study a lot,” he says, “and we should not hesitate to ask naïve questions to understand the different sciences because we do not have to possess all the skills in every technology.”