Michael Freeley Wins GE Healthcare HCA Award

The winner of the inaugural GE Healthcare HCA Award, is Dr Michael Freeley from the Institute of Molecular Medicine, Trinity College Dublin (TCD). Supported by BioTechniques, the Award recognises the outstanding contribution of HCA to scientific understanding and celebrates its positive impact on data quality and quantity, resulting in increased productivity, deeper insights and better decisions. Dr Freeley and his co-researchers, including some from the National Centre for HCA at TCD, are investigating how white blood cells (T lymphocytes) move in the body during an immune response. Movement of T lymphocytes from the blood stream into target tissues is crucial in an effective immune response against disease-causing organisms, but unregulated migration of T lymphocytes is also a major contributor to auto-immune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease and rheumatoid arthritis. A better understanding of this process could ultimately lead to treatments that selectively block this migration in these diseases.

They used the IN Cell Analyzer from GE Healthcare to measure a wide range of morphology and fluorescence parameters associated with signaling pathways and proteins that regulate T lymphocyte migration. “We are delighted to receive the first HCA Award,” said Dr Michael Freeley. “Quite simply, the scale of work that we performed could not have been done by manual means, and we estimate that the HCA approach has increased our throughput at least 20-fold. Capturing the same number of fields manually would have taken in the region of 400 hours instead of 20 hours, with the IN Cell Analyzer image analysis software saving us a considerable

amount of time.”