Human Cell Analysis: The Technology Behind the World’s Most Common Diagnostic Test
Cell analysis is a bit like the air we breathe: nobody thinks about it much, but try taking it away and people take rapid notice. Without cell analysis, it would be impossible to perform blood counting – a routine diagnostic test performed about 300 million times a year worldwide.
Each of us has about 6 quarts of blood, which contains some 10^11 white blood cells, 10^12 platelets, and 10^14 red blood cells. Tweak any of them by some percentage points and you get serious disease—anemia and leukemia just to name the best-known ones. Accurate counting and identification of the different kinds of cells in blood is therefore critical to distinguishing between illness and health.
Counting and analyzing blood and other types of cells is absolutely ubiquitous and an extremely important aspect of both health care and biomedical research. This talk will show how cell analysis is done today, and what exciting innovations are coming out that will revolutionize how it will be done tomorrow.
About the speaker, Giacomo Vacca, PhD Giacomo Vacca, PhD, is an award-winning physicist and inventor with 17 years of experience in commercial R&D. He has been responsible for several 510(k) product launches, and is the inventor of 28 patents – both issued and pending. His expertise includes optical design, microfluidics and digital signal processing.
He is the founder of Kinetic River, a biophotonics design and product development company with a mission to create innovative tools for life science research and biomedical diagnostics.
Location: Agilent Technologies, Inc. - Aristotle Room, Bldg. 5
5301 Stevens Creek Blvd., Santa Clara, CA 95051
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