Multiplex Fluorescence Immunohistochemistry using the Ultivue InSituPlex Platform on the Leica Biosystems BOND RX

Hello everyone and welcome to today's live broadcast, “Multiplex Fluorescence Immunohistochemistry Using the Ultivue InSituPlex Platform on the Leica Biosystems BOND RX,” presented by Traci deGeer, Global Product and Innovation Manager BOND RX, Leica Biosystems and Alex Klimowicz, Principal Scientist, Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals. I'm Alexis Krauss of Labroots, and I'll be your moderator for today's event. Today's educational web seminar is brought to you by Labroots and sponsored by Leica Biosystems. For more information on our sponsor, please visit leicabiosystems.com. 

Now let's get started. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that this event is interactive. We encourage you to participate by submitting as many questions as you want at anytime you want during the presentation. To do so, simply type them into the “ask a question” box and click on the send button. We'll answer as many questions as we have time for at the end of the presentation. If you have trouble seeing or hearing the presentation, please click on the support tab found at the top right of the presentation window or report your problem by clicking on the answer or question box located on the far left of your screen.

This presentation is educational and thus offers continuing education credits. Please click on the Continuing Education Credits tab located at the top right of the presentation window and follow the process to obtain your credits. I'd like to now introduce our presenters, Traci deGeer and Alex Klimowicz. For complete biographies on our speakers, please visit the Biography tab at the top of your screen. Traci, you may now begin your presentation.

Thank you so much Alexis. I'm an open innovation manager for the research platform here at Leica and one of the things that I do in my position is bring companies like Ultivue to Leica to form partnerships so that we can bring innovation to the researchers that we work with. One way that we do that is through the BOND RX system, which is our research platform. My presentation today is going to walk you through a little bit about the BOND RX platform and how that works with open innovation to allow researchers like Alex to bring things onto their system that are brand new. Let's get started and I'll show you a little bit about the system and how it works with our open innovation partners like Ultivue. 

The Freedom to Discover

One of the principal things about the platform that we bring to our customers is it gives them the opportunity to explore new ideas, accelerate test programs, and then, if you're talking to people like Ultivue or some of our other open innovation partners, they look at it to commercialize discoveries. That's something that the open software that we're going to talk about in just a little bit allows them to do with the system. 

Explore Your Ideas

Now let's start with, explore your ideas, and when you're talking about a piece of automation, what do you mean when you, say, “explore your ideas?” 

Tests Automated on BOND RX

One of the things that you can do is if you talk about a system that you can bring your third-party assay onto, and if you think about it, you see lots of little things in the check boxes. You see in many fluorescents, you see circulating tumor cells. You see TSA, which is tyramine, we're going to talk about that in a little bit. You see TUNEL. You see multiplexing. All of those different things. All of those things can be done on the same platform. 

Do you see that unique little box up in the corner that says “your test here?” Well, when we go to talk to an open innovation partner, this is somebody that's got something new and novel that not many labs are running right now in the research world. We go and actively look for those people and what we want them to do is to push the instrument to their limits and try to get their assay automated on the system and their assay becomes the next “your test here.” In this case it happened to be Ultivue that has the “your test here” button. And that's what we've done with them and you're going to see some other partners that we've done that through the years with and there's a whole pipeline of those partners that play on the system.

Things that we put on ourselves are things like the Novocastra antibodies. We've put Kreatech probes on there and we have our own detection chemistries that we run on the system that are the exact same between the clinical instrument and the research instrument. What we're trying to do is find new ways to bring things onto the clinical system through exercising what we can do on the research platform. 

Technology Introduction Timeline

There's a long history of doing things like that. If you look back to when the very first BOND RX was released in 2011, over the last seven years or so, we formed many partnerships and we've gone through many iterations of software, each time making the system a little bit more flexible. 

Open Possibilities

That opens all kinds of possibilities if you happen to be a researcher. It allows you to do things like break apart probes. It allows you to do all kinds of fluorescent multiplexing. It allows you to do IHC. People have tried all kinds of things on the system. 

Endless Customization Options

You get an endless amount of options that you can play with. That's one of the things that makes my job easy. I can walk into a laboratory and talk to a pharmaceutical company or a biotech company that's got this great idea, and ask them, “have you thought about automating it?” We can kind of play around to see if there's some way that we can make that happen. 

Pre-Staining Preparation Customization

You can do all sorts of freestanding customization. You can play with heat. You can play with, deparaffinization. All of those are things that Ultivue had to look at as they were putting together their new assay. Each company goes through things a little differently, and each one works to get a protocol that they can put on the system and make work. Some of them start with assays that are manual. Some of them start from the ground up and build an assay. 

Pre-Staining Antigen Retrieval Customization

Sometimes it's antigen retrieval that makes all the difference. Sometimes it's being able to change incubation times and temperatures. Sometimes it's the way that you wash your slides and each one of those things contributes to how well an assay will work on an instrument. 

Staining Customization

Sometimes it's bringing able to put a third-party marker onto the system, or sometimes it's not being able to run a detection chemistry that you want to run that makes a difference. Now one of the things we lean on a lot with our open innovation partners is they don't start out running a detection kit that we create. If you look at someone like Ultivue, what they do is they take open containers and they actually pour their reagents in it and they put them on the system. Things don't come in a container that we make. That's what each of our open innovation partners does. As a researcher, Alex has the same ability to do something that one of our open innovation partners does.

If he decided he wanted to run a detection color tomorrow but we as a company don't make, he could go anywhere and buy that detection color and he could give that a whirl if he wanted to. That's openness in a system that researchers like to play with. I come out of a research lab and being a researcher, I like to tinker. The ability to tinker on the system is something that makes most researchers happy. You want to be able to put what you want on the system when you want. A lot of times it's about being able to do that more than a lot of things to get your assay to work. 

There were a lot of things that when we started working with Ultivue had to be customized. Some of their reagents didn't like water. You must customize to that. One of the things at the very end of their procedure was that it couldn't sit in water. There's customization that went into their procedure and that's what happens with our open innovation partners. They helped us create our new software that came out and that's one of the things that's so wonderful about working with researchers is they come through and they help us become better. 

Accelerate Your Test Program

The “Accelerate Your Testing Program” is something that we value a lot when it comes to our customers and our researchers and our partners. 

Speed

A lot of times, speed is not something that's as important in research as it is in the clinic, but it does help us get better. A lot of times with the antibodies in the clinical laboratory, you can get those done in about 2 ½ hours. One of the things that the instrument does well is each of the drawers run independently. If we're running something like Ultivue, we can run that on one tray and run something completely different on another tray. That lets the instrument function in like two or three separate instruments. 

Efficiency

It also makes things very efficient. Now the new instrument that just came out has a way of relieving some of the strain on the laboratory by adding some visual management, which is something we didn't have on its predecessor. It has both bottles that flash colors. If you have an instrument that has a bottle fluid that's low, first it will change colors in white, and then if it really gets irritated at you, it will turn the bottle red and then it expects to get some attention for that red bottle. 

The instrument is small now. There is a bench top version of it, but the top-of-the-line instrument is a floor model. Given the size of some of the other instruments on the market, it tends to be a little bit smaller. The footprint is not extremely huge.