A biopsy is literally a "glimpse of life," and Paul Lee, assistant professor of clinical pathology in the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, got an important one of those during his residency at the University of Massachusetts.
"I noticed a specific issue with the procedure for fixing and examining tissue samples to look for signs of cancer and other diseases," Lee said. "And I had this idea."
Now, though, "All that can be arranged in a day or two. Patient care won't be compromised, or lost to follow-up."
Lee's invention employs a disposable syringe and cuvette to do individual tissue tests, using small paraffin blocks and a combined embedding-fixing process for quick, accurate reads of small biopsies.
"Let's say you're making a cup of coffee," Lee said. "If you made a whole carafe and only needed one cup, that'd be wasteful - of both time and resources. Think of this as Keurig for specimen processing."
And when lives are in the balance - not only with aggressive forms of cancer but also liver, kidney and heart transplants - time, he said, is truly of the essence. "Days matter; hours matter."
The method has other advantages, too, Lee said:
"It preserves tissue, doesn't compromise the sample, so we can do ancillary tests to revalidate results," he said. "And with the disposable cuvette there's no chance of cross-contamination. Plus it can be easily incorporated into existing infrastructure, doesn't have to upset processes or workflow."
Lee said the technique can be used by other researchers, too.
"I get requests all the times for various samples, and I have to put a lot of them off for human pathology tests." Now, he said, "They can be their own processors, and not wait for results from another lab. It's quicker for them too, and uses fewer resources."
Lee and his team have successfully tested a prototype of the invention, and a patent is pending.
