As you will be aware, laboratory reports are sent to your Practice both by electronic transfer and in hard copy form. The Directorate has received several requests to cease printing and sending hard copy reports as they have limited value with the current electronic systems in place. Unfortunately, until recently, it has not been possible to prevent the printing of hard copy reports to individual locations. We are pleased to inform you that technical advancements now make this possible.

PHE Birmingham are launching our TB Genomics Service pilot project next month.

Background

• In the last 10-months we have participated in an eight-centre international collaboration study on TB Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) led by Oxford which has used DNA extracted from MGIT. 

• The Oxford led project is a feasibility study on the use of WGS in TB diagnosis, resistance profiling and epidemiological mapping of outbreaks. During this Feasibility study, working with our colleagues at Oxford, DNA extraction and MiSeq sequencing methodologies have been established at Heartlands. Raw sequence data has been shared with Oxford through a cloud setup and analysis reports (on mycobacterial species identity, drug resistance predictions and strain typing) received within 48 hours of the raw data being uploaded.

Please find the Summer 2014 edition of the PHE Birmingham Newsletter here

Public Health England  Public Health Laboratory Birmingham will no longer be offering an IL28B testing service. Please see Letter to Users for further details.

On Wednesday 11^th June the method for the CA19-9 assay at HEFT will change from the Siemens Immulite assay to the Roche assay. Our comparisons have shown that the results are comparable in most cases; however, there were some samples which did show a poor correlation.  We are therefore going to dual report results for a period to allow transition of serially monitored patients to the new CA199 assay.

Further more detailed information is available on request. If you have any queries or comments please contact Craig Webster (Clinical Lead for Blood Sciences) by email or ext 42930.