HAEMATOLOGY
The GloCyte uses minimal amounts of sample, and the medics are getting the count they need to drive their clinical decisions for the patients
The GloCyte delivers fast and accurate CSF cell counts results in just five minutes from small sample sizes.
How has GloCyte improved patient outcomes? AM: It is very useful to have because it guides how the flow team may make up their cocktails for the CSF samples; if they’ve got a very cellular CSF, they know they can either use less sample, or if it’s not at all, they might try and use as much of the sample as possible. It’s a very useful test for us as part of the CSF processing pathway, but its intrinsic numbers are quite limited. Overall it is a part of the full CSF processing. It is important for patients because it aids in the diagnosis of CSF involvement in haematologic malignancies. Also, what is found quite a lot is some haematologic malignancies relapse specifically into the CNS. You don’t see it anywhere else other than the CNS, and with all these things, it prompts a diagnosis and early treatment, which always results in more favorable outcomes for the patient.
When a patient with haematologic malignancy is in remission, do they wait for them to be symptomatic until they check their CSF for CNS involvement? AM: I don’t think they do. I think they check it quite a lot, in line with bone marrow assessments. Certainly, if there’s any suggestion of CNS involvement, they automatically do lumbar punctures as well.
For the paediatric patients, it seems highly likely that they do just monitor it, because for the clinical trials, they obviously do it routinely. So they are purely driven by the numbers.
How has GloCyte improved patient outcomes? AM: I think our main issue was that we didn’t have a facility to do it previously, so we would have either had to withhold the service for our patients, given our
predicament with the older machines. I don’t think the trust would have stumped up the money to buy one of the big machines.
What advice do you have for hospitals that insist the manual method is sufficient? AM: My mind boggles for any of the other customers who use alternatives, to be honest with you, because we all hated using the haemocytometer. You could literally see the red cells dying in front of your eyes. So you just knew as a scientist these counts were inaccurate. It felt like a real labour to have to do it, and everyone would do the count a little bit differently. To have the technology on one side to give you the white cell count and then use this extremely crude manual technique on the other and then putting the two together never sat very well with me as a scientist. On the other side, when we had the Advia that used to give it, we had no concerns about the accuracy because it could go down to virtually zero for both.
The flip side was that it used a huge amount of sample; we needed half a millilitre of CSF for the Advia. I seem to remember, so lots of the times we didn’t get a count because you don’t always get half a millilitre of CSF – usually between 250 and 500 microlitres, rarely over half a millilitre of CSF.
So it had its own problems, and if it
wasn’t enough, we just didn’t do it. For us, this solution is ideal. We’re using minimal amounts of sample, and the medics are getting the count they need to drive their clinical decisions for the patients.
So I’m happy to sing the praises of the
GloCyte. I imagine many places may be in the same boat as we were, doing manual
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counts and if that’s the case the GloCyte is a no-brainer.
GloCyte
The GloCyte uses fluorescent microscopy and two reagents to enumerate total nucleated cells (TNCs) and red blood cells (RBCs) in under five minutes. A nucleic dye specifically stains the nucleus of TNCs and an antibody stain tags antigens on the surface of RBCs making it easy for laboratory staff of all skill levels to obtain accurate results. Stained samples are deposited onto test cartridges and vacuum is applied to capture cells on a membrane. An image of the membrane is captured by a digital CCD camera and processed via a sophisticated algorithm eliminating errors associated with manual counting.
The GloCyte is able to be less error
prone by mitigating dilution, calculation, and random errors, while using similarly small sample volumes (requires just 60 μL of sample) as manual counting but analysing a greater portion of the sample. It is able to detect down to 1 cell/µL for both TNC and RBC. With no moving parts, GloCyte
requires virtually no maintenance and maximises uptime and is contained in a small benchtop-size unit. It is FDA cleared and has a CE mark. The GloCyte can be connected to LIMS with a suitable driver and also offers results on screen, printable reports and results which can be exported in .csv format.
Advanced Instruments
The GloCyte automated cell counter is available from Advanced Instruments.
01403 210400
emeasales@aicompanies.com
www.aicompanies.com
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