St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital researcher receives the Millipore Guava Flow Cytometry Award

Oct 6 2009

Millipore Corporation (NYSE: MIL), a Life Science leader providing technologies, tools and services for bioscience research and biopharmaceutical manufacturing, today awarded Dr. Mari Hashitate Dallas of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., the Millipore Guava® Flow Cytometry Award. This award recognizes her innovative approach to using flow cytometry/cell analysis to improve the outcome of umbilical cord blood transplants in pediatric patients. Dr. Dallas will receive the recently released guava easyCyte™ 8HT flow cytometry instrument to better facilitate and expedite her research.

Using this instrument will enable Dr. Dallas’ lab to more efficiently monitor the number and type of immune cells in blood samples drawn over the course of time following umbilical cord blood transplants. From this information, the lab will assess whether immune systems are properly reconstituting following transplantation and then identify the factors that improve success.

“Dr. Dallas’ submission was selected because it best represented an application of multiparametric flow cytometry that will play an important role in improving patient outcomes,” said John Sweeney, Vice President Life Science Business Unit. “Millipore is proud to support Dr. Dallas’ innovative research knowing that the flow cytometer system will help to accelerate her critical work.”

The guava easyCyte 8HT is a key cell analysis tool which allows scientists to save critical time and funds by enabling them to take control of their research without sacrificing results when compared to those generated on traditional instruments – all within their own lab. Traditional flow cytometers need a full-time technician, making them expensive to operate, but guava flow cytometers only require the individual who will run the samples. An additional benefit of this instrument is that it can handle smaller sample volumes than other flow cytometry instruments and process samples in a 96 well plate format.

“We process 200 to 300 samples at each time point in our studies,” said Dr. Dallas. “Until now, we had to send the samples to the core lab and try our best to align our research with their hours. Having a Guava flow cytometer allows us to conduct these analyses in our own lab on our own schedule,” she continued.

Dr. Dallas’ proposal was selected from more than 70 high-quality applications submitted to Millipore by research labs worldwide. Proposals were assessed for their innovative approach to using flow cytometry to address challenging research questions and represented a wide range of applications, including stem cell differentiation, cell signaling, therapeutic mechanisms of action, and the molecular basis of disease.

Source: Millipore Corporation