Jul 31, 2018
Test standardization is a complex and multifaceted effort that’s remained a major goal for laboratory medicine’s professional societies, including the AACC and IFCC. Hemoglobin A1c is an example of a test that has undergone global standardization due to its worldwide importance in diabetes screening, diagnosis,...
Jul 30, 2018
Proper handling during the collection and processing of specimens is crucial for producing reliable results. These pre-analytical steps are highly vulnerable to the introduction of experimental bias and variance, which may drastically degrade specimen quality. Analytes are affected differently by uncontrolled...
Jul 30, 2018
According to the World Health Organization, type 2 diabetes comprises the majority of the more than 400 million people with diabetes around the world. In efforts to better understand the disease, metabolomics measurements have identified tryptophan metabolites as potential biological mediators in the development of type...
Jul 28, 2018
It was once thought that RNA only existed within cells. However, recent discoveries show that RNA is exported from cells and may be functional in cell to cell communication. This extracellular RNA can be abundant and stable and is found in bodily fluids such as saliva. Saliva has long been of interest for biomarker...
Jul 27, 2018
Liquid biopsy methods are an exciting area in cancer screening, diagnosis, and management. These methods are aimed at measuring genomic signatures of tumor cells in the blood. They rely on detection of circulating tumor cells, tumor-derived extracellular vesicles, or exosomes, or cell-free circulating DNA. Liquid...