Complement diagnostics

Published on June 29, 2017   37 min

Other Talks in the Series: The Complement System

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0:00
Welcome. I'm Ashley Frazer-Abel and I will be speaking today on "Complement Diagnostics". I work at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in the US where I run a lab that specializes in complement testing.
0:14
What I'll be talking today is the testing we use in complement for patient diagnostics to be separated from the testing that we might do for research would be more expansive. But there's also even in complement diagnostic testing, been quite a bit of evolving interest in this. As you will be hearing throughout this complement series, the number of diseases that have been recognized to be complement mediated has put pressure on the diagnostic laboratory to be ready to diagnose those tests.
0:40
So this is the outline of what I hope to cover today. And really to break down the complement assays into four larger categories; complement levels, complement functional assays, what markers we can see for whether complement activation is occurring, and then also complement genetics. We'll go through some examples of complement disorders that we would be testing in the laboratory and what tests we use for those. But then I also want to hit on some confounding factors that we need to keep in mind around storage and freeze thaw effects when we look at complement tests. And then I want to close with some important international efforts to help improve and standardize testing for complement as we go into this new area, a new time of more interesting complement testing.
1:20
So throughout this series, I'm sure you will see several versions of the complement pathway, and this is the pathway version I'll be using for my lecture today. And what I really wanna get you to get out of this, is just that there's so many components, and so many steps of complement that we could look at testing diagnostically in the laboratory. So where do we start?
1:39
From my lecture, I'm gonna start with some of the simplest measurements in many ways, and then still look at complement levels.

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