Addenbrooke’s Hospital at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust (CUH) have been using the BÜHLMANN calprotectin assays for a number of years. They initially used the fCAL® ELISA and the CALEX on a DS2 analyser, but switched technology in December 2018 to the BÜHLMANN fCAL turbo on their Siemens Advia 2400. More recently (2022) the assay was moved onto the Siemens Atellica systems. The lab currently tests around 30,000 calprotectin tests per annum and have now also switched to using the BÜHLMANN fPELA assay for elastase analysis too. Georgette Glover, a Senior Biomedical Scientist in the Biochemistry department at Addenbrooke’s talks about the change.
“We currently test around 4000 elastase samples a year, almost a 1000 more than we were doing in 2023 before we switched from the manual ELISA method. We were very pleased to have switched to a more automated method before the increase. We provide the testing for Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust and surrounding primary care, but we also test for surrounding NHS Trusts too, so we cover quite a large area. The
majority of the requests (~80%) come from secondary care.
Previously, with the ELISA method we would run in batches. These were fairly frequent due to the volume of requests we receive, and we couldn’t afford to get behind when each batch is half a day’s work for a member of staff. The ELISA method did require analysis of some samples to be repeated due to a combination of the manual nature of the method, sample consistency and high CV’s. This could cause a delay to reporting the result. Results were also manually transcribed into the laboratory information system (LIMS) which generated an additional risk of transcription errors. Primarily, we wanted to change from the manual ELISA due to the workflow
improvements offered by the automated chemistry analysers, we were also mindful of the risk to our current service due to the use of an ageing plate reader. Given that we were already running the BÜHLMANN calprotectin method with the CALEX extraction the BÜHLMANN fPELA method was the obvious choice to evaluate.”
