Neil Greenberg, PhD, Manager, Regulatory Affairs, Clinical Chemistry Systems, Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics, a Johnson & Johnson Company, will talk about how thin films changed the way routine chemistry tests are performed in hospital clinical laboratories.
As late as the 1970s, identifying substances in a patient's blood meant withdrawing large amounts of blood, a procedure that was especially difficult for young children and elderly patients. Eastman Kodak Company revolutionized laboratory medicine and clinical chemistry with the invention of thin films, microchips of coated film that provided a much more convenient way of performing these same blood tests, generating much less waste and requiring only a small fraction of the amount of blood needed previously. These specially coated films use the same base material as photographic film but contain specific reagent layers needed to produce a chemical reaction with the substance the clinical laboratory is testing for, such as blood glucose. This technology is now commercialized by Johnson & Johnson and accounts for a large percentage of such tests performed today by hospital laboratories.
Greenberg joined Eastman Kodak in 1978 and has held various managerial roles in manufacturing and quality assurance for the Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics (a Johnson & Johnson Company) VITROSTM line of in vitro diagnostic products. As manager of Kodak's Reference Laboratory, he became actively involved in international standardization of measurement procedures and reference materials for laboratory medicine in the early 1980s, and continues to work actively with the National Committee for Clinical Laboratory Standards (NCCLS) and the American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC) on various aspects of measurement standardization for in vitro diagnostics.