RE: Thoughts on today's RNS from a diagnostics poster22 Jul 2020 12:05
Cautious Optimist:
Yes, that would be one way of assessing the spare capacity.
1 I believe if hospital BAMS testing has reduced, because the wards and external community are dealing with COVID-19 swabs, then that might reduce the workload of the installed BAMS instrument.
2 We need a better understanding of how many BAMS machines are out there, '1,000’s to 10,000’s of them' is useless.
I recall Monkshood discussed this.
Monkshoods recent 07.07.2020 post contains relevant info, part of which reproduced here;
So, Maldi ToF’s are more common than I was originally told, (apologies RK) although certainly not to the extent of one in every hospital. They generally have them in the pathology labs of a larger Trust cluster. They often actually have two (one as a backup), however the instruments are evidently already at near capacity. They are quite basic and usually set up specifically for Biotyping pathogens .
How easy it would be to do Sars cov2 ? Much will depend on the assay they produce, there are multiple possible routes – whole proteins, on bead tryptic digests etc, the cruder the sample going in, the easier it will be, but this then comes with its own set of problems. If you look at the Adeptrix webpages you can see that they have further automation that they use for sample prep. Once there are more details of the assay, the clearer it will become as to how easy it is to run on the installed instruments.
The main positive is that if you have one instrument then it means you are more likely to have the infrastructure and technical support to expand the instrument number or add further automation if needed. Not having one in the first place it is a much larger barrier. It is also good that they are mainly used in pathology labs -which are used to working with pathogens (rather than, say, a lab measuring hormones), so measuring Sar cov2 is not a big leap (although they are not running BAMS type workflow for the ID’s).
In case anyone thinks that I was deramping and now ramping for nefarious purposes ! then somewhat fortuitously a company used FOI’s to the hospital trusts last September/October asking what MS facilities they have. Do a google search for FOI /NHS/ Mass Spec – a random selection is listed below. As a rule, small molecule work- hormones etc will be on a triple quad and microbial ID on a Maldi ToF (so appropriate for BAMS). As I said previously the most common are facilities for small molecule analysis.
I still stick by my original view that it is not a block buster like the LFT but there is the potential for it to be used more in hospitals than I initially thought.
From 01.05.2020 RNS:
"The diagnostic test will allow hospitals around the world to utilise their existing installed base of mass spectrometers that are not currently used for COVID-19 testing, thus contributing significantly to the increase in global testing capacity."
Presumably this came from Adeptrix who should know what they are talking about from a B
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