IBMS members raise awareness in blood health campaign
Media Planet recently organised a campaign to promote blood health awareness. In collaboration with professional bodies such as the IBMS, Cancer Research UK and the Royal College of Pathologists and The Guardian, MediaPlanet promoted awareness in a print and digital campaign.
This campaign went live 30 June and promoted new developments in research, programmes, and therapy initiatives for patients with blood and cancer related health issues. Featured were two articles demonstrating the thrombosis research of IBMS Fellow and Chief Examiner in Haematology, Dr Gary Moore and the Mobile Chemotherapy Unit initiative launched by Hope for Tomorrow charity and the pathology staff at East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust, including IBMS member Catherine Lorenzen.
Blood on the Bus
Imagine you’re a chemotherapy patient who needs a blood transfusion in addition to your treatment, but the nearest hospital isn’t in your home town. Wouldn’t it be better if instead you could go to somewhere locally and receive your blood transfusion?
Some cancer patients prefer to receive treatment closer to home. And with some of them becoming anaemic due to chemotherapy treatments, these patients need blood transfusions.
The solution: Blood on the Bus. This Mobile Chemotherapy Unit is developed, built, owned and maintained by the charity Hope for Tomorrow, and supports cancer patients requiring blood transfusions as part of their cancer treatment with blood supplied from the Blood Transfusion Laboratory from Kent and Canterbury Hospital.
Catherine Lorenzen, Chief Biomedical Scientist & Phlebotomy Service Manager for Kent and Canterbury Hospitals said, “There was quite a lot of work-up to do for something we do every day for the hospital wards. All nurses receive extra training to give blood transfusions and we must adhere to very strict national guidelines and are very keen to make it work safely and efficiently for everyone involved”.
Read the full article on the MediaPlanet website.
Advancements in thrombosis research
When a doctor’s clinical examination recognises that a patient has a problem with their blood clotting, the only way to pinpoint the exact cause is for the hospital laboratory to perform assays (blood tests) to identify abnormalities in specific proteins or cells that are causing the symptoms.
Dr Gary Moore, Consultant Biomedical Scientist and Head of Viapath Diagnostic Haemostasis & Thrombosis Laboratories at St Thomas’ Hospital and his colleagues developed a new assay that helps identify a particular type of abnormal antithrombin, a regulatory protein that stops blood from clotting too much, based on whether or not it functions properly when binding to heparin.
Gary commented, “I considered that if you do the usual assay with the short incubation and do it deliberately again with a long incubation period, the result will be stable in non-heparin binding defects however long you incubate it but there will be a discrepancy if there is a heparin binding defect.”
Generating a ratio of the results between short and long incubations, the Heparin-antithrombin binding (HAB) ratio, detects most heparin binding defects of antithrombin.
This assay has proved useful and has been used by other scientists in Europe. Dr. René Mulder’s study of patients who had heparin binding defects in their antithrombin (and utilised the assay) was published in the British Journal of Haematology.
For the full article, see the MediaPlanet website.