How do I prepare serum and saline tube?

If you do not have our proprietary media tubes handy at the moment, please use the serum and saline protocol from the CSU Hematopathology Lab:

Place 1ml of saline (0.9%, LRS, Norm R) into a no-additive, white-top or red-top tube (plain tube with no additives or serum separator).
Add 0.1 ml of serum from the patient, or another healthy animal of the same species, to the saline in the white-top or red-top tube.Aspirate using suction.Gently squirt contents into the tube containing the saline and serum mixture.
Rinse syringe by drawing up saline and serum mixture and gently squirting it back into the tube. Don’t make bubbles.
Repeat aspiration and rinsing multiple times until solution is no longer transparent. A turbid solution usually indicates adequate cellularity for flow cytometry testing.

Other Questions

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Is this test available outside the US? Could I order the test?

Because we require live, fresh, cancer cells within 24-48 hours of doing a fine needle aspiration, we are ONLY offering our services in North America at this time. If you already had an experience of sending biopsy samples to the US in 24-48 hours, we could discuss the work further. Please contact info@imprimedicine.com.

I have a patient with likely lymphoma/leukemia. For a blood sample, can I just submit an EDTA blood tube or do I still use the ImpriMed tubes (and if so, how many tubes and is an additional EDTA blood tube still needed with that)?

If the patient is suspected of leukemia, blood collected in the EDTA tube should be fine. If it is lymphoma, we might need FNA from the affected organ/lymph node. We can suggest FNA in ImpriMed media tube (1) and 2ml of blood sample in an EDTA tube.

We have a case coming in today we would really like to submit but don’t have transport media tubes; is there any other method we could do in order to submit a sample, such as aspirating and placing it in tube with serum?

Please use serum and saline that you would normally do when you send to other reference laboratories.

How long until I get my ImpriMed report?

Our flow cytometry, PARR, and Immunoprofile reports are emailed to you 3-4 days after receipt of your patient’s sample(s) at our lab. The Personalized Prediction Profile reports are emailed to you 6-7 days after receipt of your patient’s sample(s) at our lab.

For patients who already have flow cytometry, can you just run the drug sensitivity profile?

No, we cannot run a drug sensitivity-only service. Please understand our AI-based drug response prediction models require flow cytometry and PARR parameters generated from our own instrumental setting. Even if the patient already has flow cytometry results from another laboratory, we need to run flow and PARR again anyway.