Clinical Immunology diagnostics service

The Clinical Immunology Service (CIS) provides a comprehensive Clinical Immunology diagnostics service to the West Midlands, regional services in lymphoma/leukaemia diagnosis and national services for neuro-immunology and myeloma testing. Being situated within the University of Birmingham (UoB), the CIS also provides central trials analysis for a number of national and local research studies and has a strong track record in immunodiagnostic development.

The CIS is the anchor tenant for the Precision Health Technologies Accelerator (PHTA) Home - PHTA Ltd, hosted within the Birmingham Health Innovation Campus (BHIC) Birmingham Health Innovation Campus - Birmingham Health Partners. This ambitious new development will leverage the existing Birmingham Health Partners ecosystem to drive innovation and economic growth.

The CIS has built a nationally leading reputation based on our foundations of quality and delivery and has the expertise, reputation, and networks to progress towards being a global leader in diagnostic development, translation and testing. This supports UoB's ambition to become a global top 50 University and contributes towards the success of the PHTA and BHIC.

To ensure the CIS not only remains able to deliver and maintain current business and workload, but also to ensure it can sustain delivery during the move to the PHTA and deliver the anticipated growth in the future, we need to continually update our equipment and methods to ensure improved efficiency, quality and capabilities. The CIS is a UKAS ISO15189 accredited laboratory offering comprehensive blood cancer, autoimmunity, neuroimmunology, immunodeficiency and allergy diagnostic services to local and national NHS services.

Additionally, the CIS hosts the Midlands Integrated Reporting for Haemato-oncology (MIRHO), a blood cancer diagnostic service, providing blood cancer flow cytometry to the whole of West Midlands; this is an area of ensured increased growth as new therapies are commenced and survival improves for blood cancer patients. To support the growth and development of this service we need to update our serum protein electrophoresis and immunofixation/isoelectric focussing instrumentation to improve our efficiency and resilience. Our plan is to replace our existing Sebia Capillarys 2 with a Capillarys 3 Octa and to add an additional Hydrasys focussing system to provide additional capacity, a back-up instrument in case of down time and the ability to run isoelectric focussing gel for oligoclonal band analysis in multiple sclerosis and beta 2 transferrin detection in patients with cerebrospinal fluid leaks.