Robot Deployed in War Against Disease

City of Hope
Monday, 25 March 2002

City of Hope medical teams will be able to diagnose diseases faster and formulate individualized treatments quicker with the help of a new robot-like device.

Called the DeRisi Version II, or microarrayer, robot, it is a major advancement in speed and accuracy over the work that would otherwise strain the capacity of traditional laboratory bench techniques.

It hums and chugs as it works in a refrigerated, dust-free room at City of Hope's Sydney M. Irmas Laboratory for Functional Genomics, under the direction of Steven Flanagan, Ph.D., and Carlotta Glackin, Ph.D.

Said Flanagan, "An example of the kind of question the microarrayer will be asked to answer is how to identify the 10 percent of the sufferers of myelodysplasia, a form of blood cancer, who also will go on to develop chronic myeloid leukemia (CML)."

Glackin said the robot, the most productive microarrayer yet designed, can analyze simultaneously the 49,000 genes in the human genome and arrive at an accurate answer faster than clinicians could.

City of Hope is one of only a few institutions in the world to build and operate an instrument of this advanced capacity and speed, which reads and prints up to 500 slides a week, each slide containing more than 40,000 spots, Flanagan said.

City of Hope Cancer Center is one of the world's leading research and treatment centers for cancer and other life-threatening diseases, including diabetes and HIV/AIDS. A pioneer in the fields of bone marrow transplantation and genetics, City of Hope is a National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center. For more information, visit www.cityofhope.org/functionalgenomics. City of Hope … where the power of knowledge saves lives.

For more information, or to contact City of Hope, see their website at: www.cityofhope.org