FlowScore presents a cost-effective, accessible, and reliable tool for assessing RBC quality, making it an ideal candidate for widespread use in blood banks and haematology, where oxygen delivery is crucial.
Helen Bradbury European Medical Journal.
Innovation from University of Oxford.
“We establish FlowScore as a widely-accessible and cost-effective surrogate of RBC oxygen-unloading kinetics. As a metric of a cellular process that is sensitive to storage and disease, we propose FlowScore as an RBC quality marker for blood-banking and hematology.”
Pawel Świętach, Professor of Physiology, Oxford University
FlowScore is an algorithm of flow cytometric data as a surrogate of the rate at which red blood cells offload oxygen.
FlowScore expresses the efficiency of oxygen offloading as red cells pass through capillaries. A score of 1 represents normal oxygen delivery. After just one day at room temperature, the FlowScore increases to around 1.4, indicating a significant decline in the red cells’ ability to offload oxygen.
Treatment with Rejuvesol restores the FlowScore to a value of 1, indicating that the oxygen kinetics of rejuvenated cells are nearly identical to those of fresh blood.
“FlowScore could become quite fundamental to the way blood is tested to ensure its quality. It is a technical breakthrough that should improve the monitoring of stored blood and drive improvements that will most benefit vulnerable recipients of red cell transfusions.”
Dr Peter Smethurst, NHSBT Blood and Transport Component Development Laboratory
Innovation
FlowScore is a major innovation in assessing red blood cells ability to offload oxygen. To see the full Lancet publication click the link below, or see our summary here.