A drop of blood provides a lot of valuable information. However, it takes several hours to analyze the blood of a patient and make a diagnosis. This takes away a lot of time that's crucial for treatment. A new method intends to considerably speed up this process by testing the cells in the blood in terms of their deformability and immune response.
In this MEDICA-tradefair.com interview, Dr. Daniel Klaue and Dr. Christoph Herold explain real-time deformability cytometry, a technology they both developed, describe the new possibilities this could open up for medical science and reveal what ripe fruits have to do with all this.
Dr. Klaue and Dr. Herold, what happens in real-time deformability cytometry?
Dr. Daniel Klaue: We like to explain the technology with an example taken from everyday life: You go to the supermarket with the intent to buy a very ripe fruit. You can only determine how soft or firm the fruit is by picking it up and squeezing it in your hand. After all, all fruits look the same with the naked eye. That's also the case with cells. The stiffness of a cell lets us draw conclusions about its condition – for example, whether an immune cell or leukocyte is flexible enough to migrate from the bloodstream into much denser tissue to destroy pathogens. We are unable to determine this just by looking at the cell. Needless to say, unlike a fruit, we are also unable to simply take a tiny cell into our hand. That's one issue. Another issue is that we don't want to squeeze ten fruits but rather millions of cells in one drop of blood for instance. ...
Read the complete interview with Dr. Daniel Klaue and Dr. Christoph Herold at MEDICA-tradefair.com!