News
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LabBuzz was created as a way of responding to our members’ need for technical and scientific news and the latest med lab trends. CSMLS Manager of Learning Services, Michele, was finding this news daily in her inbox and twitter feed and wanted a way to share it. LabBuzz was the perfect solution.
It takes a team to make this publication happen, so now, with the help of CSMLS Researcher, Laura, who finds and summarizes the articles, Michele and John, the MLTs curating the issue and our proofreaders, Ashley and Radmila, we are happy to bring you this publication direct to your inbox every two weeks.
We hope you find the articles we deliver to be relevant, timely and useful for the work you do every day.
Thank you to those who have been with us since the beginning and a warm welcome to those who have just joined us!
Quality
A recycling bin here, a geothermal system there: St. Cloud VA gets greener
St. Cloud VA Health Care System is working every day to become a more environmentally friendly, sustainable entity. The system was among the top 25 hospitals in the U.S. for environmental stewardship in health care, awarded by Project Greenhealth.
In a laboratory that performs about 100,000 tests a month, small changes to reduce waste, recycle and contain toxins can add up: 1) The laboratory has been mercury-free since 2011. 2) Everyone recycles, breaking down all the materials supplies are shipped in. 3) There are small boxes to collect recyclables under almost every station. The facility recycling rate is 58%. 4) Staff created a paper-free process, saving approximately 325 sheets of paper each week. 5) Laboratory staff changed the blood culture collection system to reduce biowaste. 6) The lab uses automatic light systems to save electricity. 7) The staff also tries to keep chemicals out of its wastewater. Nothing stronger than a light detergent goes into the city sewer system. 8) The staff created ways to capture excess toxic chemicals so they can be properly recycled or disposed of. What can your lab do?
Point-of-Care
Self-powered paper-based 'SPEDs' may lead to new medical-diagnostic tools
A new medical-diagnostic device made out of paper detects biomarkers and identifies diseases by performing electrochemical analyses - powered only by the user's touch - and reads out the color-coded test results, making it easy for non-experts to understand. The self-powered, paper-based electrochemical device, or SPED, is initiated by placing a pinprick of blood in a circular feature on the device, which is less than two-inches square. SPEDs also contain "self-pipetting test zones" that can be dipped into a sample instead of using a finger-prick test. The SPED top layer is fabricated using untreated cellulose paper with patterned hydrophobic "domains" that define channels that wick up blood samples for testing. A machine-vision diagnostic application was also created to automatically identify and quantify each of these "colorimetric" tests from a digital image of the SPED, perhaps taken with a cellphone, to provide fast diagnostic results to the user and to facilitate remote-expert consultation. The bottom layer is a "triboelectric generator," or TEG, which generates the electric current necessary to run the diagnostic test simply by rubbing or pressing it.
Clinical Chemistry
Researchers 3-D print first truly microfluidic 'lab on a chip' devices
Researchers at Brigham Young University (BYU) are the first to 3D-print a viable microfluidic device small enough to be effective at a scale much less than 100 micrometers. The accomplishment is a major breakthrough toward mass-producing the medical diagnostic devices cheaply. “We're deliberately trying to start a revolution in how microfluidic devices are fabricated," said Greg Nordin, a BYU electrical engineering professor. The work has produced labs on a chip with flow channel cross sections as small as 18 micrometers by 20 micrometers. The researchers' 3D printer uses a 385 nm LED, which dramatically increases the available selection of UV absorbers for resin formulation compared to 3D printers with 405 nm LEDs. Nordin says the advantages of 3D printing for microfluidic device fabrication are already well-known and that their method, digital light processing stereolithography (DLP-SLA), is an especially promising lower-cost approach. DLP-SLA uses a micromirror array chip, like those in most consumer projectors, to dynamically create the optical pattern for each layer during layer-by-layer printing of a device.
Hematology
The G6PD flow-cytometric assay is a reliable tool for diagnosis of G6PD deficiency in women and anaemic subjects
Glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) activity is essential for redox equilibrium of red blood cells (RBCs) and, when compromised, the RBCs are more susceptible to haemolysis. 8-aminoquinolines (primaquine and tafenoquine) are used for the radical curative treatment of Plasmodium vivax malaria and can cause haemolysis in G6PD deficient subjects. Haemolytic risk is dependent on treatment dose and patient G6PD status but ultimately it correlates to the number of G6PD deficient red blood cells. Published online in Dataverse, researchers analyzed samples with a range of G6PD phenotypes and haematologic conditions from 243 healthy volunteers of Asian or African-American heritage using both the spectrophotomeric assay and the G6PD flow-cytometric assay. Overall 18.5% of subjects (29.3% of Asian females) presented with anaemia, associated to decreased RBCs volume and/or reticulocytosis; the flow-cytometric assay showed good correlation with the spectrophotometric assay in both normal (R2 0.83-0.90) and anaemic subjects (R2 0.84-0.91) and was less influenced by haemoglobin concentration, number of RBCs and reticulocytosis. This resulted in more precise quantification of the number of G6PD deficient RBCs and presumably higher predictive power of drug induced haemolytic risk.
Transfusion Medicine
Teenagers' blood being sold for £6,200 a shot
Transfusions of teenage blood are being sold for £6,200 a shot, with a US company claiming it may have anti-ageing properties. More than 100 people have undergone a clinical trial at Ambrosia, a start-up in San Francisco founded by Stanford-trained doctor Jesse Karmazin, in which they are injected with two and a half litres of plasma, the liquid portion of blood which remains after other cells are removed. The early results have been encouraging: “It could help improve things such as appearance or diabetes or heart function or memory” said Mr Karmazin. “I’m not really in the camp of saying this will provide immortality but I think it comes pretty close, essentially.” However, researchers have warned the procedure is unproven and the trial is unlikely to provide much in the way of clinical evidence to support Mr Karmazin's claims. It has also been criticised for failing to include a placebo group and for having participants pay to take part in the trial.
Microbiology
Halifax company fighting antibiotic-resistant superbugs
A Halifax company is testing a new chemical compound that acts like a magnet to break down the defences of antibiotic-resistant superbugs by depriving them of the one thing they all need — iron. Chelation Partners Inc. has been working for years on an iron-binding polymer it calls Dibi, and with the help of researchers at Dalhousie and Cape Breton universities, the compound is now in clinical trials using dogs with ear infections, said Bill Cheliak, one of the company’s founders.
“We’ve invested 75 years and countless hundreds of billions of dollars to develop antibiotics, and we have this big portfolio and we just can’t walk away from it.” said Cheliak. The company’s compound has been shown to bind with iron and weaken bacteria, suggesting it could be added to antibiotics to boost their effectiveness in the fight against infection. Dibi is a large polymer and the iron is almost hidden inside. The researchers believe that it’s invisible to the bacteria because of the nature of this big, bulky polymer protecting it. Without iron, infectious pathogens simply can't grow or reproduce. “This is a very simplified hypothesis, but it’s basically the basis of this,” said Bierenstiel. Adding value to existing drugs provides a quicker and less expensive regulatory route to marketing pharmaceuticals, said Cheliak, and it results in a widely available medicine at a lower cost to consumers compared to brand-new drugs.
Anatomic Pathology
Clinical Laboratories May Need to Expand Test Portfolios with Companion and Complementary Diagnostic Assays as More Test-Dependent Drug Therapies Enter Market
Nearly two decades after companion diagnostics first made headlines, pathologists are encountering a new concept—complementary diagnostics. Unlike companion diagnostics, complementary diagnostics aid the therapeutic decision process, but are not required when prescribing the corresponding drug. The lack of a regulatory link to a specific testing technology is the critical distinction between a complementary and a companion diagnostic. The role companion diagnostics can have in driving personalized medicine is already leaving its mark with drugs such as Herceptin,” said Peggy Robinson, US Vice President of ANGLE plc,. “The impact of complementary diagnostics, and how the two types of tests come to share the stage, awaits to be seen.” As the market for companion and complementary diagnostics expands beyond targeted therapies for oncology, clinical laboratories and pathology groups can position themselves to “add value” to their patients’ journey through the entire healthcare continuum. Read this insightful article and find out more about complementary diagnostics!
Molecular Biology
Personal Flow Cytometers Tackle a Multitude of Applications
Once upon a time, flow cytometers were big, bulky instruments most often run by highly skilled operators in core facilities. With the advent of compact, user-friendly personal flow cytometers, many functions and capabilities of advanced multicolor, multiparametric flow cytometry are moving to the individual laboratory. Instruments such as the peristaltic pump-driven BD Accuri™ C6 Plus are equally at home on a cancer research or molecular biology bench as in a mobile limnology lab, performing tasks such as immunophenotyping and functional assays, gene expression studies, queries of activation, and even concentration measurements and absolute cell counting. This article samples some of the life science applications to which personal flow cytometers such as the Accuri C6 Plus are being put to use. Take a moment to learn more about immunophenotypying, sentinel immunophenotypying, apoptosis and proliferation, cell signalling and calcium flux, transfection and expression, and phenotypying microbes – all in relation to flow cytometers!
Cytogenetics
FISHing in the genomic testing age
Genetic analysis has come a long way; we now have an ever-expanding collection of analytical tools in the diagnostic laboratory. So why do we still need a technique that usually only looks at one or two loci? The simple answer is that results from fluorescence in-situ hybridization (FISH) can quickly confirm diagnoses, guide clinicians’ judgements regarding differential diagnoses, and correlate results with clinical risk—thus enabling an informed choice of treatment type and intensity. Understand why FISH is such a popular technique and the clinical utility it brings to the diagnostic bench in this article. However, will the demise of FISH come soon? Quite possibly at some point, but the technique will be around for a long time yet. As the cost of next-generation sequencing decreases, more labs may switch; however, conventional cytogenetics is still the cheapest and easiest whole genome screening test—albeit at very low resolution—and FISH testing dovetails nicely into a cytogenetics lab set-up. The future has yet to be seen!
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