Ohaus MB series moisture analyser helps a specialist veterinary transplant company preserve tissue quality for pet transplants
These days, more than ever, pets are considered part of the family.
Now available are pet medical insurance, day care services, groomers - even pet-friendly hotels.
And, like any treasured member of the family, pet owners are more willing to invest in the best quality of life for their animals.
So, if the family cat or dog is hit by a car, suffers a gunshot wound or needs treatment for cruciate ligament repair or other serious disease, pet owners are more likely than ever to invest the time and money to improve the animal's health.
Veterinary Transplant Services (VTS) - with the help of Ohaus Corporation - helps save animals' lives and improves their quality of life by providing veterinarians with tissue, bone and cornea grafts that can help pets walk again, better recover from chemotherapy, or even see again.
VTS in Kent, Washington State, USA, is the world's leading provider of bone, soft tissue and cornea allografts for transplantation into animals.
The company maintains a local donor programme with emergency clinics and rescue groups and because of the generosity of pet owners who consented to donate tissues when their pet suddenly, and often tragically, died, VTS is able to provide such grafts to help other pets.
VTS routinely provides transplant-quality bone, tendon and corneal grafts for use in dogs and cats, and custom designed grafts for other animal species on request.
One of the grafts most commonly needed by veterinarians is bone in freeze-dried form.
Freeze-dried grafts can be stored at room temperature and be made ready for transplantation in just a few moments.
Preparing these bone grafts for eventual use by a veterinarian includes recovering these tissues from donor animals, processing them into a usable form and freeze-drying them to remove just enough moisture in a controlled fashion to ensure that the tissue structure doesn't degrade over time and that the constellation of proteins that stimulate bone healing are preserved.
Initially, bone grafts contain nearly 20 percent moisture and VTS aims to reduce that water content to somewhere between one and three percent; an amount that the scientific literature indicates to be an optimal target for preservation of proteins, while enabling long-term storage.
With the Ohaus MB series moisture analyser, now VTS is able to ensure that each freeze-dry run accomplishes just that.
One of VTS's greatest challenges - up to now - was finding an efficient, reliable method of routine in-house testing that allows them to complete these tests in a timely, productive, cost-conscious fashion.
Helen Newman, director of VTS, understands the importance and the sophistication of removing moisture from tissue grafts.
"Removing too much moisture can compromise the protein structure of the tissue and render it useless, so having a programmable system like the MB45 moisture analyser allows us to ensure that we are producing a high-quality, functional graft for the patients.
"The MB45 moisture balance provides accuracy and consistency day to day, technician to technician," she said.
Designed to quickly, effectively and affordably measure moisture content, the Ohaus MB45 incorporates state-of-the-art halogen heating with precision weighing technology to give a fast and accurate method for moisture content determination.
It offers a simple, easy-to-use interface and programmable library of test parameters that allows the operator to place a sample in the tray, identify the test to be performed and simply walk away.
The MB series's large LCD display is capable of displaying real time results throughout the duration of the test, and its convenient RS232 interface allows users to connect the product to a computer, printer or other peripheral device to save, print and display results in a variety of formats.
Most importantly for VTS, the MB series analysers allow their technicians to perform one quick and simple test on a sample in order to achieve precise, reliable, repeatable results that would have required a great deal more time and effort to obtain in the past.
"What we find so valuable about the MB45 is that it provides results so quickly - within minutes rather than days, which is the amount of time associated with other residual moisture measurement techniques we've tried," said Newman.
Another feature that VTS finds beneficial is that the user can control how high the sample temperature gets and how quickly it heats up.
"This is very important when removing moisture from tissue samples because we only want to remove water.
"We don't want to volatilise lipids or other elements that would alter the weight of the sample and give a false reading of the residual water in the samples".
Using the MB45 in its tissue processing practices has allowed VTS to improve the quality of the bone grafts preserved for use in pets and other animals.
"This system has allowed us to maintain the consistency and quality of the tissues we provide to our veterinary customers.
"And, it's so easy to operate and takes up such little space that it's a pleasure to use."
