Research demonstrates superiority of micro capillary cytometry over standard microscopic methods for monitoring dendritic cells for research and therapeutic applications
New collaborative research between scientists at the Institut Jean Godinot in Reims, France and Guava Technologies demonstrates the superiority of micro capillary cytometry technology over standard microscopic methods for monitoring dendritic cells for research and therapeutic applications.
The Guava PCA system, which employs patented micro capillary cytometry technology to bring the power of flow cytometry to the laboratory benchtop, consistently demonstrated less user variability and greater reproducibility in achieving dendritic cell counts and viability assessments than did the widely used trypan blue staining methods.
Moreover, the Guava PCA system enabled users to complete their cell assessments more quickly and easily than those time-consuming and tedious manual microscopy methods, which currently represent a 'gold standard' method for cellular immunology research.
Jacky Bernard and Anne-Laure Millard of the Institut Jean Godinot will presented their research, entitled 'Applications for Cell Culture Therapy Research and Dendritic Cells Analysis' at a seminar at the Institut Gustave Roussy, Paris, France, hosted by Laurence Zitvogel and Ozyme.
Bernard and Millard investigated the Guava PCA as a potentially better way to monitor and study dendritic cells, rare immune system cells that play a key role in priming the body to fight cancer and other diseases.
Dendritic cells are of great interest not only for scientists studying the immune system response, but also as potential new avenues to the treatment of cancer and other diseases.
"Achieving accurate cell counts and viability assessments of dendritic cells presents special challenges for researchers because dendritic cells are difficult to culture, do not produce homogeneous cultures, and are subject to physiological changes in appearance in response to changes in their environment," said Bernard.
"Thus tedious, highly subjective, manual microscopic methods of cell assessment are subject to great variability and lack of reproducibility, especially between different users or when only low numbers of cells are available for counting.
In contrast, we demonstrate the Guava PCA produced significantly lower variability in measurements and a superior ability to distinguish between viable and dead cells, even in mixed cell cultures or cultures with low concentrations of dendritic cells." The Guava PCA-96 and Guava PCA cell analysis systems simplify cell analysis and biological research by providing powerful benchtop systems that scientists in the lab can use with less than one day of training.
Moreover, these systems require only a small number of cells for accurate results compared to traditional cell analysis methods.
Both the Guava PCA-96 and Guava PCA are flexible, highly affordable and compact, providing high content read outs from a single microplate well or tube, right at the benchtop.
This gives researchers comprehensive test results fast, streamlining the entire R and D and drug discovery process.
