Voyaging boldly through the transfusion medicine galaxy

The National Space Centre in Leicester is the UK’s largest visitor attraction dedicated to space and space exploration, and has attracted around a quarter of a million visitors each year since it opened in 2001. Partly funded by the National Lottery and the Millennium Commission, the visitor attraction is an educational facility and research centre dedicated to the subject of space travel and science. Since it opened, the centre has staged a variety of events including visits from NASA astronauts such as Buzz Aldrin. Earlier this year, however, it was the venue for another important mission – the 2010 Ortho Clinical Diagnostics (OCD) immunohaematology user meeting.

Prepare for lift-off
Introducing the day’s proceedings, Eike Stohlmann, OCD marketing manager for transfusion medicine, northern Europe, [0]warned delegates to prepare themselves for an exciting lift-off as they embarked on what was billed as ‘a voyage through the transfusion medicine galaxy’. Eike gave a brief overview of OCD’s achievement’s to date in helping to provide safe blood transfusions to patients using its innovative diagnostics solutions, which began as long ago as 1944. Since then, OCD has pioneered some of the most important technological advances in serological diagnostics, from early work with blood grouping developments to the latest advances in automated systems.

She outlined how, as a result, almost every blood transfusion in the world has been touched in some way by OCD’s immunohaematology reagents and instrumentation. These include the Ortho BioVue column agglutination technology system, which has a proven track record over the past 10 years in over 20 countries, as well as the latest Ortho AutoVue Innova (AVI) automated blood grouping analyser, together providing total screening, diagnosing and monitoring solutions for transfusion laboratories.