OFFICES ARE CLOSED FOR THE HOLIDAYS
Please note that SCIREQ offices in Montreal and Phoenix will be closed during the holidays. Our last day is Friday December 21, 2012 and we will be back hard at work on Tuesday January 2, 2013.Should you have any questions before then, we would be happy to assist you.
From all of us at SCIREQ, happy holidays and we wish you a healthy and prosperous 2013!
Your SCIREQ team!
Discussion sessions during the meeting will include:
The user group meeting will take place at the Sheraton Wild Horse Pass Resort & Spa in Chandler, Arizona.We will provide lunch and light refreshments and there is an option for staying overnight!
Please contact us at 1.877.572.4737 or at [email protected] for registration details.
Space is limited - register today as we look forward to you joining the discussion.
As everyone is getting on their way to the 12th Annual Meeting of the Safety Pharmacology Society, we would like to invite you to come by our SCIREQ booth No. 218 to get a hands-on impression of our systems for pre-clinical lung function measurement and inhalation toxicology.
Our flexiVent system is widely used to obtain an accurate, highly detailed and specific assessment of respiratory mechanics using the Forced Oscillation Technique (FOT). However, the flexiVent is best known for its use in rodents, and it is perhaps less widely known that larger flexiVent modules are available to measure lung function in animals up to or potentially exceeding 10 kg, including primates and dogs.
In Safety Pharmacology, FOT measurements as obtained with the flexiVent to date have been limited to "second tier" measurements because they required passive, intubated subjects and hence necessitated anesthesia. However, we have now developed new technology that promises true respiratory mechanics measurements in conscious animals. In recent tests carried out in collaboration with Dr. Simon Authier at CiToxLAB in Montreal, we were able to measure airway resistance at baseline and following MCH injection in restrained, conscious dogs and primates. Only a glimpse of these data will be available at SPS, though, with a fully detailed presentation is scheduled for SOT 2013.
While our recent tests represent an important milestone, more work will be required to bring this technology to maturity. Nonetheless, we would like to invite you to stop by our SPS booth for more details on what we have achieved so far and what the next steps will be. A discussion with you in Phoenix will allow us to make sure that we further develop this exciting technology in a direction that best meets the needs of your application and of the Safety Pharmacology community at large. We look forward to talking to you!
An international group of 14 participants took part in this year’s Jackson Laboratory workshop on phenotyping mouse models of human lung diseases. Respiratory mechanics measurements using the forced oscillation technique was the topic of three presentations and two laboratory sessions. In addition to the scheduled sessions, the workshop was set to provide a unique opportunity to gain practical knowledge on this integrative, powerful and translational technique. Participants also had the ability to discuss their individual applications with key leaders in the field during informal after-dinner discussions. Having a look at this year's schedule could give you an idea of what is waiting for you next year. Mark your calendars - we would be happy to meet you there!
For the 4th year in a row our chief scientist Dr. Annette Robichaud is a confirmed presenter at the Jackson Laboratory Workshop from September 19 to 24 in Bar Harbor, Maine. Dr. Robichaud will give a talk at the beginning of her laboratory session introducing the flexiVent and focusing on respiratory mechanics, airway responsiveness and other types of measurements. This will be followed by two hands-on experimental sessions.
Other speakers this year include:
There are still spaces available and if you wish to register you can contact Nancy Place at 207-288-6257 or via email at [email protected]
We look forward to seeing you in Bar Harbor Maine!
We are starting our fall conference season by going to ERS in Vienna. It would be great to talk to you at the joined emka/SCIREQ booth B2.04. at the Reed Messe.
During the conference we would be happy to demonstrate the MSX (multi-subject extension) for our flexiVent FX to you. The MSX combines the efficiency of easily and simultaneously measuring respiratory mechanics in four parallel subjects with the highly detailed input impedance and Constant Phase Model measurements that make the flexiVent so unique.
Although our chief scientist Dr. Robichaud will not be present at ERS, she has looked through the conference schedule and thought the following course and sessions could be of interest to you:
Saturday, September 1st - 9:30-13:00 - Room C5
Sunday, September 2nd - 12:50-14:40 - Halle A-19
Monday, September 3rd - 12:50-14:40 - Halle A-14
Monday, September 3rd - 12:50-14:40 - Halle A-18
Tuesday, September 4th - 12:50-14:40 - Halle A-17
We look forward to seeing you in person at ERS - it is always a pleasure!
Happy Birthday, SCIREQ! Exactly 15 years ago, on June 1st, 1997, SCIREQ Scientific Respiratory Equipment Inc. started operating in a small loft in an old garment building on Montreal's boulevard St. Laurent, not far from McGill's Meakins-Christie Laboratories that we grew out of. A few hundred square feet of space, Ikea desks, a few tools from Home Depot and a shoestring budget... 15 years already - it's been a fun ride!
We would like to take this opportunity to thank all those who contributed to SCIREQ's growth and success, including our world-class staff, our tireless distributors, suppliers, business partners, and of course our loyal, committed and at times patient customers! It has been our great pleasure to serve you over the past 15 years, and we look forward to working with you and supporting your science for the next 15 years and on!
We would like to announce the release of Service Pack 2 for flexiWare 7.2. This release resolves an issue with mechanical ventilation when used with flexiVent systems.
The nature of the issue we recently identified and resolved is such that the pressure limit was not always properly applied during Controlled Mechanical Ventilation (CMV). The issue was first introduced with the release of version 7.2, therefore users of flexiWare 7.1.1 or lower are not affected. Users of flexiWare 7.2 should note that for most experimental protocols used with the flexiVent, the pressure limit is encountered only at high levels of bronchoconstriction and elevated PEEP. Therefore, with very few possible exceptions, there should be no significant impact on the outcomes of your experiments.
There are no other changes in flexiWare 7.2.2, therefore there is no need to update from 7.2.1 to 7.2.2 for users who do not work with flexiVent instruments and CMV.
To download flexiWare 7.2.2, please log into the TechNet section of our website. Upgrading from previous releases of flexiWare 7.2 does not require a new registration code or unlocking key, however a firmware upgrade will be necessary.
We are pleased to announce that SCIREQ Scientific Respiratory Equipment Inc. has acquired the activities of SCL Medtech Inc. SCL Medtech offers a family of products for aerosol research, inhalation toxicology and occupational Asthma, including the GenaSIC™, GenaSOL™ and GenaMINI™ product lines. Details about these products may be found at www.sclmedtech.com.
SCL Medtech's product lines present an ideal complement to our current SCIREQ products, providing an array of exciting integration opportunities. We anticipate that these will rapidly translate into net benefits for our clients, and we look forward to posting further details in this regard as they become available.
For current SCL Medtech clients, SCIREQ will honour all open quotations and existing service contracts for SCL Medtech products. SCL Medtech clients can also expect to benefit from SCIREQ's international presence and our established relationship with the pulmonary research community.
For further details, please contact [email protected] or [email protected].
Approximately 7,200 scientists from academia and industry met earlier this week at the annual Society of Toxicology meeting in San Francisco. We would like to thank the numerous attendees who stopped by the SCIREQ booth in the ToxExpo exhibit hall. It was a pleasure to meet you, and to have an opportunity to present our products and discuss your applications. We will contact you to follow up on those discussions in the near future.
For those who missed SOT, the next opportunity to meet us at a conference will be at the Experimental Biology meeting that takes place April 22-24 in San Diego, CA.
The New Year is already more than a month old, and we hope that it started out well for all our clients, colleagues and associates. For SCIREQ, 2012 promises to become an exciting year during which we expect to roll out a number of interesting innovations to make your experiments more accurate, efficient and traceable.
Skip to: Multi-subject flexiVent | Conscious Oscillatory Mechanics | Translational Research | flexiWare 7 | Pressure Control Ventilation
One of our upcoming new products that has already received a lot of attention is the multi-subject extension for the flexiVent, a prototype of which was shown at last year’s ATS meeting in Denver [1]. This extension combines the efficiency of easily and simultaneously measuring respiratory mechanics in four parallel subjects with the highly detailed input impedance and Constant Phase Model measurements that make the flexiVent so unique. We expect to launch an initial version supporting mice at this year’s ATS meeting, with versions for rats and guinea pigs to follow by the end of the year. A call for beta testers for this device will follow soon on this blog.
Multi-subject extension for the flexiVent.
Our team of scientists and engineers continues to work towards a mature, easy to use solution for measuring transfer impedance (Ztr) in conscious subjects. Following up on our last year’s poster [2], we will present more data on this topic at this year’s ATS meeting. It is yet a bit too early to predict when this technique will become commercially available, but we will of course keep you posted about further developments.
Translational research has become one of the scientific buzz words of the decade. At SCIREQ, we are doing what we can to offer scientists tools that permit relating measurements obtained in the lab to those obtained at the bedside. A couple of years ago, we introduced an extension to the flexiVent permitting measurements of FEV0.1 in mice. A version of this extension for larger subjects is expected later this year. There are a number of important differences between these measurements and human spirometry [3], but this technique nonetheless offers at least a first degree of continuity as you compare preclinical and clinical data.
Our engagement in translational research won’t stop there, though. Ultimately, we are working towards a set of techniques that can be applied virtually identically in laboratory animals and humans to permit a much closer correlation between results from the lab and the clinic. We expect to publish more on this topic in the course of the next few months.
With the introduction of the new flexiVent FX system in 2010, we also released our new flexiWare 7 software. As many of you know, this was not only an upgrade but a generation shift, and our software architecture is now more advanced, modern, efficient and expandable than ever before. As with any major transition, it took us and our distributors a few months to learn how to most efficiently present, configure and support this software to make sure it meets all your experimentation needs. This transition is now complete, and the new architecture and features translate into more efficient experimentation and data analysis for many labs. We’d love to give you a demo!
Our most recent flexiWare release, version 7.2, includes Pressure Controlled Ventilation (PCV) as a new ventilator mode. This feature is currently in beta test status and requires a special license key. If you are interested in using PCV, please contact our Technical Support team. Further ventilator modes are in preparation – details to follow...
[1] http://blog.scireq.com/2011/06/multi-subject-flexivent-unveiled-at-ats.html
[2] Am J Respir Crit Care Med 183;2011:A2187
[3] Shalaby et al., Respiratory Research 2010, 11:82
