ELISPOT

I started reading a library book on biotechnology. To cut a long story short, I think that the author could have really used a good editor. Some of his paragraphs could have easily been cut into two or three, and some of his grammar is just pretty sloppy. (Yeah, I know. People make mistakes. I'm not blaming him for that; I'm just saying that the book could have used a lot more editing.)

I discovered this video on YouTube.com. Some fella created an educational video on the ELISPOT process. I think that he's speaking Vietnamese, but I'm not sure.

The introductory text was clearly taken from the Wikipedia entry on the ELISPOT process. Later on, he steps the user through an animated depiction of an ELISPOT assay. This animation was clearly downloaded from this site, where it is available as both an MPEG movie and an interactive PowerPoint file. (The producer of that video was clearly using the PowerPoint version.)

There's a popular animated presentation of the ELISPOT process on this page right here. It has had a Shockwave depiction of a typical cytokine ELISPOT assay, and a great number of pages elsewhere on the web were linking to it.

This page now contains a link to an MPEG depiction of this process. (The MPEG version is slightly modified, since Shockwave animation can be interactive whereas MPEGs cannot.) The same page also contains a link to a downlaodable MS PowerPoint file which contains another (also slightly modified) version of the same animation. Very, very cool.

This article talks about how the US government is attempting to develop a new, safer vaccine against smallpox. This is part of an attempt to protect the country against the threat of bioterrorism--that is, the use of weaponized pathogens.

The article talked about how monkeys have been used to test the efficacy of the vaccine. Inoculated monkeys are exposed to the monkeypox virus, which closely resembles smallpox. The researchers then determine if the vaccine provides any protection against the virus.

Obviously, it would be unethical to test the vaccine on humans in the same fashion. (Heck, it's hard enough testing them on monkeys! How tragic.) Fortunately, the ELISPOT technique allows the immune response to be monitored ex vivo; that is, without injecting any pathogens into a human host.

One company is having a promotional offer in which they help customers donate their older ELISPOT analyzers to a worthy laboratory in Africa or South America. That's a delightful sentiment, and there are surely many needy labs in those regions that could use the assistance.

I wonder if it might be possible to donate some of these items to other third-world nations, though -- possibly in some parts of Asia, perhaps? I'm sure that there are commercial reasons why these options aren't being offered. Electrical issues doubtlessly come into play, for example; after all, not all countries use the same electrical ratings. India, for example, uses these oddball plugs that are quite annoying.

Oh, well. Anyway, it's a delightful sentiment, and I hope that it gets a lot of attention.

Cell-Bio Biotechnology Co. Ltd. is another company that I came across. I'd like to introduce them to some of the people back home. I wish that more companies back home would seek to do this sort of work, but sadly, the enterpreneurial spirit over there is severely lacking.

This firm has been around for a long time now, and they do some pretty diverse work, including a lot of reagent kits and ELISPOT-related offerings. I wish I could understand more of what they say, but of course, I can't read much of the language.

I found the hospitalpharma.com site yesterday. Pretty interesting. The press releases section looks really useful, and it appears to mirror some (if not all) of the releases from Pharmiweb.

The careers section is also pretty nice. I wish I had known about this back when I was job-hunting. Of course, back then, I didn't have as much experience with biotechnology.

Oh, and I like the fact that it has a features section as well. I could get information overload from looking at this site... and it'd be pretty tempting, too. (Yeah. Like I don't have enough to read.)