Sally, I think you answered your own question! You wrote: "If so, why would someone want one of these stainers?" And yet, they sell so many! I have found the Bond to be an excellent instrument and in my opinion it is unrivalled in the market place.
I have just recently spent 10 months doing extensive evaluations of Bond, Dako and Ventana. I brought each instrument in-house to try. When all was said and done the Bond was the best fit for my lab. Each lab needs to evaluate what is the best fit for their particular situation (ie number of staff, experience level of staff, volume of tests, workflow, etc.). But with regard to the cost for online dewax and retreival: what is your time worth? Doing these steps off-line means more tech time, more opportunity for mistakes and opens the possibility of peripheral instrumentation failing and holding everything up down the line. As for the cost per slide: I spent many agonizing hours going over pricing info for all 3 instruments (trying to "uncode" the sales speak) and in the end (by my calculations) the difference between 2 of the 3 was less than a dollar per test and the 3rd was considerably higher. I won't say which one is which, but I will say the Bond was not the higher of the 3. Hope this has helped. Cheers! Greg Greg Dobbin, R.T. Chief Technologist, Anatomic Pathology Dept. of Laboratory Medicine, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, P.O. Box 6600 Charlottetown, PE C1A 8T5 Phone: (902) 894-2337 Fax: (902) 894-2385 "And in the end it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years." - Abraham Lincoln >>> "Sally Price" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 11/20/2008 7:35 PM >>> All, After reading this thread I just had offer my comments. I'm not a big fan of systems that do the dewax and AR, primarily because it costs way too much to automate these steps. I've never used the Bond, but I hear that you've gotta put some plastic thingy - that probably costs too much - on top of each slide, you gotta use their detection reagents - which probably cost more than other companies, they charge you for empty barcoded reagent containers, all the slides in the same tray have to use the same detection reagents - which means that the continuous-feed feature has some serious limits, it can't do double-stains, and they have less than 50 IVD-approved antbodies. Can someone verify for me if all this issues are true? If so, why would someone want one of these stainers? The Dako stainer is a dinosaur and with all the newre/better ones available, they should probably take it off the market. Cheers, Sally -----Original Message----- From: Josie Britton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Michael Bradley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Histonet@lists.utsouthwestern.edu Sent: Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:31 am Subject: RE: [Histonet] Dako Hi, We just got the new Bond Max IHC stainer and we love it. You just cut the slides dry them and place them on the Bond. It does retrieval, antibody staining, and counter stain. You just dehydrate , clear, and mount your coverslip. It is easy to use. It has 3 individual slide tray's of 10. You can load more slides on the empty tray's and start a new batch while the others are running. We run into the pathologist's adding more antibodies to the list an hour after we have run the first batch frequently, so this feature is great. When you add more IHC's the run time on all the slide tray's run times do increase, but it's better than having to wait another 2-3 hours to put your next set of immuno's on. Hope this helps! Josie Britton HT Cheshire Medical Center 580 Court Street Keene, NH 03431 -----Original Message----- Message: 9 Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:17:52 -0500 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Histonet] Dako To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], Histonet@lists.utsouthwestern.edu Just another FYI... The Biocare IntelliPath does the same thing, but has 4 trays of 10 and it allows you to make one of the trays?RUSH.? SO depending, on the volume?of IHC you do either of these machines would work out great. Roxanne _______________________________________________ Histonet mailing list Histonet@lists.utsouthwestern.edu http://lists.utsouthwestern.edu/mailman/listinfo/histonet ------------------------- Statement of Confidentiality This message (including attachments) may contain confidential or privileged information intended for a specific individual or organization. If you have received this communication in error, please notify the sender immediately. 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