2.5 Blood spot cards are used to develop equipment and tests
Blood spot cards can be used to develop new equipment and tests, which may make it
possible to identify more conditions early, when babies are just a few weeks old, leading to
early treatment and preventing serious disability in later life.
For example, newborn blood spot cards have been used to develop equipment called a
tandem mass spectrometer. This allows tests to be carried out on very small amounts of
blood.
The development of new health care equipment and tests relies heavily on the biomedical
industry. Commercial organisations working with newborn screening laboratories may wish
to use blood spot cards directly to ensure new equipment meets required standards. In
addition researchers may wish to do research funded by commercial organisations using the
blood spot cards. University researchers and commercial organisations increasingly work
alongside one another. This means is can be difficult to distinguish between research by
university researchers and research by industry.
In the future commercial organisations may be interested in accessing whole collections of
blood spots. This has not occurred in relation to newborn blood spot cards, although it has
happened with other adult blood samples, for example the DeCode project in Iceland [see
www.decode.com/ for more information].
Like other uses of the UK newborn blood spot bank, commercial uses of the blood spot
cards are strictly regulated (see Section 3 for more information).
Use of the blood spot cards by commercial organisations raises the issue of who owns the
knowledge gained. This issue is particularly important where there are financial implications
from the findings, either for the researchers, or for the company which funds the research.
Q5a. Please consider the following statement and tick one of the 5 options below:
It is appropriate that blood spot cards are stored, beyond the 5 years required by the
screening programme, to develop equipment and tests.
1. Strongly agree
2. Agree
3. Neither agree nor disagree
4. Disagree
5. Strongly disagree
Please give your reasons for your answer:
Q5b. Do you have any comments about commercial companies using blood spot cards to
develop equipment or tests?
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