Research & Development
Technology Awards
Title of the award: 2020 National Commendation for Invention “Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Award” | ||
Title of the award-winning invention: Invention of a urine sample analyzer useful for the early detection of disease (Patent No. 6232046) | ||
Winners: Masanori Kawano, Akinori Kawai, Masatsugu Ozasa, and Kanako Nagaoka | ||
Description of the invention:
This invention relates to a urine sample analyzer for the highly accurate detection in urine of formed elements such as red blood cells, white blood cells, non-squamous epithelial cells, atypical cells, and bacteria. It has conventionally been difficult to accurately detect non-squamous epithelial cells such as renal tubular epithelial cells derived from the kidney and urothelial cells derived from the bladder, which are of high clinical significance, and atypical cells that contribute to the detection of bladder cancer with automatic analyzers.
In this invention, we focused on the fact that the size of particles and the amount of nucleic acid vary depending on the type of formed element in urine, and used the fluorescence signal with an amplification factor corresponding to the amount of nucleic acid of each particle in urine, which enabled us to detect non-squamous epithelial cells, atypical cells, and particles of various forms in urine with high accuracy.
The present invention allows for accurate classification of renal tubular epithelial cells derived from the kidney and urothelial cells derived from the bladder by detecting non-squamous epithelial cells in urine, and this helps to direct patients to the appropriate hospital department at an early stage. In addition to the above-mentioned formed elements, the invention enables the provision of detection information suggesting atypical cells for research purposes, and is therefore expected to lead to the early detection of bladder cancer in the future.
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