University of Washington Medical Center - CDS-5 Cytogenetic Drying Chamber - Case Study

It’s not often you lovingly hug a 450-pound piece of equipment, but if it makes your work life easier you show your appreciation. The CDS-5 helps lab technologists create consistent and reliable environments for their work regardless of the day-to-day variables, like the weather.

Imagine the weather outside impacting your office work indoors. Sounds inconvenient, right?

That used to be a daily inconvenience for cytogenetic technologists at the Cytogenetics and Genomics Laboratory at the University of Washington Medical Center. How easy or difficult a workday could be depended on Seattle’s rainy climate. Weather variances—like temperature, humidity, and dryness outside—affected the genetic tests done inside the lab, leading to imperfect and inconsistent testing conditions. That is, until a CDS-5 Chamber was ordered for their lab.

The CDS-5 Chamber, a cytogenetic drying system for performing chromosome spreading tests, assists cytogenetic lab professionals create a consistent, reliable, and repeatable testing environment, regardless of what’s happening in the ambient laboratory surroundings.

Prior to using a CDS-5 Chamber, all the chromosome tests performed needed to be constantly adjusted and tweaked manually until the ideal temperature and humidity environment was achieved in the lab. The ambient lab environment was significantly impacted by the weather. If it was dry outside, the cells would sometimes dry faster and the chromosomes wouldn’t spread adequately, leading to poor quality metaphase (the second stage of cell division) spreads. On a humid day, the cells would sometimes dry slower, causing overspreading where chromosomes could escape the cell into another part of the microscope slide or into another cell.

The Cytogenetics and Genomics Laboratory at the University of Washington Medical Center is a full-service diagnostic pathology lab specializing in constitutional, neoplasia, and research testing. Five directors, nine technologists, two technicians, one genetic counselor, and lab supervisor, Christine Donovan, staff the state-of-the-art lab. “The equipment is really helpful and has improved work in the lab,” added Donovan. “Our techs love the CDS-5 chambers because of how easy they are to use and how they have made their jobs easier.”