Category: Blood Collection

Rapid Onsite Fixation of Human Whole Blood Samples with Teiko’s Two-Step TokuKit for Clinical Trials

Posted on by Amelie Sen

About the Webinar

In this live webinar, Ramji Srinivasan, Cofounder and CEO, and Kristina Magee, Associate Director of Lab Operations, will guide you through a full demo of the TokuKit, covering ever step from blood draw to kit processing and storage at -80°C. The TokuKit is designed for collection, fixation, and long-term preservation of whole blood samples, for cytometry analysis of longitudinal patient samples from multi-site clinical trials.

About the Speakers

Before Teiko, Ramji was Cofounder, CEO and Chairman of Counsyl, a women’s health genetic screening laboratory. Counsyl screened over 1M prospective parents, mothers-to-be and women at risk of hereditary cancer. In 2018, Counsyl was acquired by Myriad Genetics, Inc for $375M in cash and stock.

Ramji earned a B.S. in computer science and an M.S. in financial mathematics, both from Stanford University. Ramji also attended Stanford’s Graduate School of Business before dropping out to start Counsyl.

Prior to Teiko, Kristina Magee completed her MD as well as PhD in Cell Biology at the University of Bern, Switzerland. There, she investigated metabolic targets for the use in AML differentiation therapies. Following this, she held a role as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Utah before joining Teiko in early 2024.

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Pre-fixation versus post-fixation: what’s the difference?

Posted on by Ramji Srinivasan

Pre-fixation versus post-fixation. Sounds complicated. What do those terms mean, anyway?

Pre-fixation: The pre-fixation time is from drawing blood to putting it into our first buffer “stable lyse,” starting the blood fixation process. This stage needs to be done within five hours from the time of blood draw.

(The time between adding Buffer 1 and adding Buffer 2 is the “fixation time” which is a separate measurement that should be the recommended 15 min. At this point, the sample is “fixed”: meaning the cells have been “snapshotted” in place.)

Drug developers care about this measure because it can tell them how long a phlebotomist has to put the blood sample into a collection kit. A five hour window gives drug developers the flexibility to collect blood samples from multiple patients throughout the morning and process them all in the afternoon, or collect in the afternoon and process at the end of the day.

Post-fixation: The amount of time once the sample has been fixed and frozen, to when the sample is actually run on the cytometer and data is produced. This can be on the order of months, or even years.

Drug developers care about this measure because it can tell them how long the sample is stable for. For trials that run for 24 months, drug developers want to know that they can get the same quality of data from the 24 month-old samples from their first patient as their most recent patient.