Archive for April, 2009

2009 American Association for Cancer Research (“AACR”) | Conversant

Friday, April 24th, 2009

We had a great time at this year’s AACR conference in Denver this week. It was fascinating to see the amount of interest and buzz around Circulating Tumor Cells (“CTC”) and Circulating Endothelial Cells (“CEC”). Industry and Academic scientists are extremely focused on studying these rare cells.

This has proven difficult for a couple of reasons:

1. Access – it is very difficult to get access to Stage IV metastatic cancer patients. Additionally, the commercially available Veridex assay is really only optimized for breast and prostate cancer.
2. Scarcity of Cells – in circulation, these CTCs are very rare… 1 cell per 1.0mL is considered a “high reading”

That is where we come in. We have access to pre-screened CTC patients. In other words, we know which Metastatic patients have CTCs and we can collect blood from them. This has opened up research possibilities for our clients that never before existed.

We are excited about the direction of this research, and we are very pleased that we are able to help researchers.

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Human CD19+ B Cells in CLL | Tips and Tricks | Conversant

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

Today we hosted Mike Warnement, our regional technical sales representative from STEMCELL Technologies. Mike was a great resource to us as we further refine our primary cell isolation methods from periperal blood mononuclear cells (“PMBC”) and bone marrow mononuclear cells (“BMMC”) for Chronic Lymphoid Leukemia (“CLL”) specimens.

Because we can collect fresh whole blood and fresh bone marrow samples from Chronic Lymphoid Leukemia patients and deliver them overnight, we get a lot of requests for CLL. We’re also getting more and more requests for isolation of PBMC, BMMC, but also CD19+ B Cells from CLL patients. We not only can deliver CD19+ B Cells with over 96% purity, but we also extract DNA, RNA, and fix B Cells upon request.

We were also glad to have Prof. Catherine Sanders, a research investigator from Dr. Jian Han’s Lab, join us in our lab as we worked through our quality assurance protocols for enumeration, purity, and CD19+ B Cell specificity. Their work has often included our primary cells in the areas of hematology, cancer, and lupus.

Using a variety of STEMCELL’s technologies, we’re fast on our way to isolating wide varieties of primary cells from CLL, Acute Myeloid Leukemia, Chronic Myeloid Leukemia, and other diseased cells and normal cells.

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