News
FDA releases new food safety guidelines. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has proposed two new food safety rules designed to prevent food-borne illness. The proposed rules, currently subject to a 120-day public comment period, aim to ensure that the U.S. food supply is safe by shifting the focus from responding to contamination to preventing it. They put much of the responsibility on food distributors, who would be required to put into effect additional safety measures.
The first rule would require makers of food to be sold in the United States to develop a formal plan for preventing their food products from causing food-borne illness. The rule would also require them to have plans for correcting any problems that arise. The second proposed rule concerns enforceable safety standards for the production and harvesting of produce on farms.
The burden of food-borne illnesses in the United States is substantial. One in six Americans suffers from such an illness every year. Nearly 130,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die. The FDA asserts that preventing food-borne illnesses will improve public health, reduce medical costs, and avoid the costly disruptions of the food system caused by illness outbreaks and large-scale recalls. With recent outbreaks linked to cantaloupe, peanuts, leafy green vegetables, and cheese fresh in the public mind, the new guidelines are timely.
Quest Diagnostics acquires UMass Memorial Medical Center’s clinical and anatomic pathology outreach laboratory businesses. Quest Diagnostics completed its acquisition of the clinical outreach laboratory business of UMass Memorial Medical Center, the largest healthcare system in central New England. Separately, the company announced it has acquired UMass Memorial’s anatomic pathology outreach laboratory business. Both businesses are based in Worcester, MA.
In addition, Quest Diagnostics announced that it has finalized a lease agreement for 200,000 square feet in a facility in Marlborough, MA, where it will build a state-of-the-art clinical laboratory. The testing services of the acquired UMass Memorial laboratory businesses as well as Quest Diagnostics’ existing full-service clinical laboratory in Cambridge, MA, and its Athena Diagnostics specialty neurology testing subsidiary in Worcester will transition to the new facility when it becomes fully operational, which is expected to take 18 to 24 months. The facility will be developed based on best practices from Quest Diagnostics’ network of laboratories in the United States and eventually will employ as many as 1,200 medical, logistics, and administrative staff.
Gene Therapy
Gene therapy reprograms cardiac scar tissue into healthy heart muscle. A cocktail of three specific genes can reprogram cells in the scars caused by heart attacks into functioning muscle cells, and the addition of a gene that stimulates the growth of blood vessels enhances that effect, say researchers from Weill Cornell Medical College, Baylor College of Medicine and Stony Brook University Medical Center in a report that appears online in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
During a heart attack, blood supply to the heart is cut off, causing the death of heart muscle. The damage leaves behind a scar. Changing the scar into heart muscle would strengthen the heart. To accomplish this, researchers transferred three forms of the vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) gene that enhances blood vessel growth or an inactive material (both attached to a gene vector) into the hearts of rats. Three weeks later, the rats received Gata4, Mef 2c and Tbx5 (the cocktail of transcription factor genes called GMT) or an inactive material.
The GMT genes alone reduced the amount of scar tissue by half, and there were more heart muscle cells in the animals that were treated with GMT. The hearts of animals that received GMT alone also worked better as defined by ejection fraction—the percentage of blood that is pumped out of a filled ventricle or pumping chamber of the heart— than those that had not received genes.
Honors
Future lab professionals awarded API scholarships. Five college students were recently awarded a medical laboratory science scholarship from the American Proficiency Institute (API). Although they come from varied backgrounds, all expressed a strong interest in educating the public on the importance of medical laboratory scientists in the healthcare setting. API awarded $2,000 scholarships to Molly Griffin, a senior at Michigan State University; Aaron Lin, a senior at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center; Kristyn McCulley, a senior at Indiana University; Corrine McGuirk, a junior at Stony Brook University; and Britton Odle, a junior at Weber State University.
Awardees explain how they envision their role in the clinical laboratory. “When people ask me why I’m excited about my major, I tell them that it’s something that’s on the cutting edge of technology and innovative science,” says Lin. Adds Odle, “I have pictures of parasites, blood cells, and bacteria hanging up on my family room wall. I like explaining to people what medical technology is when they ask about the pictures.” “Clinical lab work is more about the individuals we help than the tests we run,” concludes McCulley.
Lab of the Year
There’s still time to nominate your lab to be MLO’s “Lab of the Year.” Online nominations are being accepted through February 11 at mlo-online.com/LabOfTheYear. A first prize winner and two runners-up will be selected and saluted in the April 2013 issue of MLO. Any nomination must be original and exclusive to MLO and not have been submitted, either original or edited, to any other publication or online media outlet currently or within the previous year.
What are the “requirements” to be a Lab of the Year nominee? Clinical labs of any size and location are eligible. Most broadly, you will want to demonstrate your lab’s contributions to quality patient care. Beyond that, consider the categories under which you are asked to describe your lab in the nominating form: customer service, contributions to patient care, teamwork, productivity, efficiency, quality control, innovations, creativity, and lab inspection scores. Emphasize what is particularly successful about your lab, in terms of engaging with and responding to the needs of its community, contributing to the success of the larger institution, meeting an unaddressed need, making a difference in people’s lives. What makes your lab outstanding, and what makes your lab special?
The MLO team looks forward to reading about some outstanding labs—and celebrating in print how three of them are having a positive impact on the profession and on patient care in their communities.
