nPOD Screening Lab Partners
Our screening laboratory partners are nPOD’s “detectives,” identifying donors that are in early stages of pre-type 1 diabetes (have type 1 diabetes autoantibodies) but have no clinical diagnosis of the disease. Our laboratory partners screen for multiple OPOs and are recognized as national leaders in serology testing.
Our laboratory partners test over 1,500 donors annually for the nPOD project. Gifts from autoantibody positive donors have the potential to help our scientists answer fundamental questions related to the etiology and progression of type 1 diabetes.
Our screening lab partners include:
VRL Eurofins Pre-Transplant Testing – Human Cell & Tissue Division’s focus is performing Donor Eligibility Screening and Microbiology Testing for the transplant and medical communities. VRL has 7 highly complexity laboratories located in Atlanta GA, Boston MA, Dallas TX, Los Angeles, CA, Philadelphia, PA, San Ramon, CA and its original location in Denver, CO.
The Center for Organ Recovery & Education (CORE) is one of 58 federally designated not-for-profit organ procurement organizations (OPOs) in the United States. The CORE service area includes many counties of Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia, as well as Chemung County, New York. CORE works closely with donor families and designated health care professionals to deliver the gift of hope by coordinating the surgical recovery of organs, tissues and corneas for transplantation and research. In addition, the CORE laboratory provides serological testing for an additional 7 neighboring Organ Procurement Organizations.
The Oklahoma Blood Institute is the 6th largest non-profit blood center in the US. Our 17 donor centers span Oklahoma, Arkansas, and parts of Texas. Our primary mission is to be the donor-to-patient lifeline. We collect and test whole blood, plasma, and platelets from about 300,000 volunteer donors each year to provide safe, transfusable blood products to area hospitals. In addition, we partner with national pharmaceutical and biotech companies to collect apheresis products for the manufacturing of their cell-based cancer treatments, provide products and services to local and national researchers, and perform our own cutting-edge research toward the development of new therapies.
KRONUS® is a leading provider of immunodiagnostic reagents and test kits to the research and clinical laboratory marketplace. As a partner of nPOD, it makes antibody kits that replace older kits used by nPOD like the radioimmunoassay, with the newer Elisa Kits. This change is critical to the nPOD project because the new modifiable kits reduce the amount of testing time from 24 hours to 4 hours.
nPOD Screening Lab Partner Resources
If you are currently an nPOD screening lab partner, or would like to learn more about what it means to be an nPOD screening lab partner, below are resources:
- Screening lab protocols. These protocols are the same of all of our screening lab partners and are made public to ensure the standardization of our methods.