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To my mind the one certainty in medical research is that rapid progress will
continue to be made in the understanding of the molecular basis of
disease. A random stroll through the contents of PNAS, Cell, Nature etc.
will identify a stack of potential cllinical applications for cytometry in fields
such as cell cycle regulation, cell signalling, or mechanisms of cell injury.
Many of these papers use flow or image cytometry, but very few of the
authors seem to be members of CCS or ISAC. I also suspect that many of
the members of CCS or ISAC are unaware of this basic work.
In other words, while CCS and CCD fight their intermindable turf wars as to
who says whether a med tech has done a good CD4 count, there is a
wealth of oportunity for new and clinically relevant applications of
cytometry. Regardless of how clinical cytometry societies and journals are
organised, they are dead in a few years time unless the new
understanding of the molecular basis of disease is translated into novel
clinical applications of cytometry.
Historically, cytometry meetings like Charleston or ISAC have attempted to
do this by bringing in a few heavyweight speakers, but often these just
turn up to give their standard talk, and then fly out again without
establishing any lasting dialogue. How then do we best develop
"translational cytometry"? I think there are two basic issues.
Firstly, our meetings need to be made more attractive to basic researchers,
which probably also means making them more affordable. Cytometry
societies should consider small focus meetings of interest to basic
scientists in order to discuss hot areas of translational research, in addition
to their regular jamborees.
Secondly, we need to take a serious look at the tools of our trade. Like
molecular pathology, clinical cytometry is just a box of tools, and I think
that the relative success of molecular pathology in recent years is due to
the fact that their tools are easier to use than our's. Cytometry is potentially
the more powerful toolbox, but we are still only scratching away at
fundamental problems such as sample preparation (particularly from the
common solid tumours), quantification of numbers of molecules per cell,
and data interpretation. This mailing list is a particularly useful forum for
discussing these issues, but I would like to see the cytometry societies
become more active in these basic issues.
David Hedley
Ontario Cancer Institute/Princess Margaret Hospital
Toronto
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