Janet:
I can only presume that you saw the same slick demo (where you are -
Atlanta) that I did here in Houston as part of a BD sponsored workshop. We
had the president of R&D come out with his computer driven presentation.
VERY slick. If it truely works, I see that it could revolutionize clinical
immuno labs. (I was once a director of such a lab. We soon parted ways as
I prefered the basic science bench! So what I'm saying is that my
perspective isn't totally from the outside...). The first thing I'd say
is that it would make the traditional Array insturment obsolete as well as
a few others in clinical chemistry. Having had to intrepret Array data,
that would be my first "choice casulty". They still haven't got it going
with cells so traditional surface phenotyping would still be a necessity.
Again, if it works true to it claims, the accuracy and throughput would be
phenomenal.
It will obviously take some standardization trials and if memory serves,
for such trials, I think they are selling it at a very reduced cost for
clinical labs willing to give it a whirl.
Had I still been affiliated with the clinical lab, I'd be making motions to
give this a try at the very least. I say that because as a casulty of
"managed care" with the hospitals in St. Louis merging, all I saw was few
to no additional employees hired, but the work load going up. So I figured
that we end up going to a 10-12 hour day, or find some way to increase the
throughput of the whole lab. I was greatly impressed.
Hope this helps,
David