Clinical Chemistry Podcast

A Review appearing in the October 2018 issue of Clinical Chemistry describes the trends and the technologies that have emerged in the past decade and are shaping contemporary point-of-care testing.  We are joined by the Review’s first author, Dr. Ping Wang.  She is Associate Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and Director of Clinical Chemistry and Core Laboratory at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. 

Standardization efforts for amylase have been limited by a lack of commutability in the current certified reference material.  New candidate reference materials have been developed to potentially overcome this limitation, facilitating their use for calibration and trueness control of routine measurement systems.  An original article appearing in the August of 2018 issue of Clinical Chemistry describes the commutability assessments of these new candidate reference materials for pancreatic alpha amylase.  The authors investigated if a reference material with an artificial matrix could be commutable for routine methods and compared to different statistical approaches to assess the commutability of the candidate reference materials.