"The reagents that are used to diagnose haematological malignancies have undergone vast improvements in the last couple of years"
The Haematology department of Truro Hospital has been using BD Oncomark reagents from BD Biosciences to help speed up and streamline its leukaemia diagnosis and classification services. Nigel Oakes, head of the immunology section in the department, explained: "The reagents that are used to diagnose haematological malignancies have undergone vast improvements in the last couple of years." "Originally for a basic diagnostic panel we would have needed 12 tubes.
We have now embarked on a rolling programme to change to BD Oncomark reagents, which only uses five tubes, saving us considerable time by reducing pipetting, centrifuging and analysis.
There is a clear advantage to using three or four fluorochromes simultaneously, with the added flexibility to mix and match different combinations as well." Nigel continued: "We used to separate out lymphocytes and cells of interest in a leukaemia sample before analysis but now we can actually look at the whole blood or bone marrow sample.
There are still quite a lot of reagents in the panel, particularly for leukaemia, because we need to know exactly the type and stage of maturity of the leukaemia we are dealing with.
While still a comparatively long process, continual technological developments are having a significant impact on the time taken to make a thorough diagnosis."
