Press release summary
UW Medicine has verified and placed Roche Diagnostics’ cobas Mass Spec solution into patient testing at its Central Laboratory in Renton, Washington, making it the first U.S. academic laboratory to use the automated mass spectrometry platform in routine clinical service.
The health system announced the implementation Nov. 5. Patient testing began Nov. 2, initially for vitamin and hormone assays. UW Medicine said it expects to add therapeutic drug monitoring, transplant anti-rejection drug measurements and toxicology testing as additional assays become available.
The platform automates liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry steps that traditionally require substantial hands-on sample preparation, specialized staffing and troubleshooting. UW Medicine has more than two decades of clinical mass spectrometry experience and is using its new central laboratory to evaluate how the automated workflow performs within an academic health system.
Why it matters to laboratory readers: The implementation provides an early operational example of automated LC-MS/MS moving into routine hospital testing. Laboratories considering similar systems will need independent performance data, local verification, carryover and interference studies, middleware and LIS validation, staffing plans, service support and clear assay-expansion criteria before deployment.
Read the original UW Medicine release.
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