Indianapolis (July 2015) – As part of their commitment to support the fight against HIV/AIDS, Beckman Coulter Life Sciences is making a donation of $2,500 (USD) to the AIDS Vancouver charity at the 2015 International AIDS Society (IAS) Conference, being held at the Vancouver Convention Centre on July 19-22, 2015 in Vancouver, Canada. The funds will go to the charity’s Health Promotion Program.
The donation is being made on behalf of Beckman Coulter Life Sciences as part of their CARES (Cellular Accessible Retroviral Evaluation Systems) Initiative in Africa. This focuses on providing innovative solutions for the monitoring of HIV and AIDS treatment.
Dr. Jeannine T. Holden, the company’s Director of Scientific Affairs will present the donation to Zdravko Cimbaljevic, the charity’s Director of Development & External Relations. This takes place at 3:30 pm on Wednesday July 22, 2015, on the Beckman Coulter booth # 204. The company plans to carry out a survey on their booth and they will encourage participation by agreeing to donate $5.00 for every survey completed.
AIDS Vancouver was the first AIDS service organization in Canada. It was launched in 1983 in response to the growing need for community health organizations to support individuals vulnerable to the epidemic. The Health Program is a specialized community – based support service that provides each person with his or her own caseworker. They then work together for a period of up to five months to identify individual needs and set achievable goals. Mr. Cimbaljevic said, “Each year, AIDS Vancouver helps more than 7,000 vulnerable people from all parts of the world to access vital support. The donation from Beckman Coulter Life Sciences will help us maintain and expand what we can do to help them.”
The CARES Initiative in Africa started in 2004 after Professor Debbie Glencross, a South African laboratory scientist, found a different and less expensive way to measure a patient’s CD4 count. To qualify for antiretroviral treatment through the national program, a person’s CD4 cell count must be 200 ml or less.
Beckman Coulter is announcing an expansion of the CARES Initiative at IAS. They have developed a compact flow cytometry analyzer (the AQUIOS CL Flow Cytometer) that can run the assay* nearer to the patient and be used by less experienced operators in smaller, local centers. Previously, blood samples had to travel for several days to reach a hospital laboratory with cytometry analyzer.
Dr Holden explained: “For the first time there’s an instrument that offers high quality, fully automated CD4 counts in the near-patient setting. The rapid turnaround time and ease of use mean that doctors and patients can get results in well under an hour, and timely treatment decisions can be made.
