Blood / Hematology
Physiological Oxygen in human blood is far lower than the 20.9% O2 outdoors at sea level. Arterial blood oxygen ranges from 10-13% O2 and venous blood averages 5-6% O2. Even in healthy tissues, oxygen gradients produce lower local oxygen levels. In bone marrow, where new blood cells are produced, oxygen tension can range from 6% down to 1% O2 (or less) depending upon local vascular physiology.
Since oxygen is critical in vivo for refulating cellular function, O2 control in vitro is also necessary for more physiologically relevant conditions. Oxygen-controlled chambers mimic physiologic oxygen levels (or physioxia) for culturing blood cell types including lymphocytes (T cells and B cells), NK cells, macrophage, platelets, hematopoietic stem cells, hematopoietic progenitors, and leukemic cell types. Physiologic oxygen incubation and handeling systems (also called hypoxia workstations) can prevent rapid and irreversible damage to blood cells that occurs during even brief exposures to supraphysiological room O2 levels for cell isolation and handling. For studying hypoxemia related pathology, in vitro and animal hypoxia chambers enable modeling of anemia, polycythemia, and beta thalassemia.
Physiologic oxygen chambers, physioxia workstations, and hypoxia chambers from BioSpherix Ltd hematology research. The ProOx C21 & C-Chamber is a physiologic oxygen chamber permitting control of O2 and CO2 conditions within existing laboratory CO2 incubators. For full-time maintenance of optimal, physiological conditions during cell incubation and cell handling steps, the Xvivo System allows scientists to avoid the shock cells experience when transported in and out of traditional incubators. Configuring the Xvivo System with multiple, individually controlled incubator chambers help researchers match individual O2 and CO2 protocol requirements over the full range of physiological oxygen tensions while accelerating experimental throughput. For animal models, the hypoxia chamber configuration, ProOx 360 & A-Chamber, is useful for reproducible control of static O2 levels.
Equipment Options
ProOx C21 & C-Chamber
BioSpherix Ltd provides hypoxia chambers and hypoxia workstations designed to help blood / hematology researchers increase both the reproducibility of experiments and the relevance of their work. The hypoxic chamber, ProOx C21 & C-Chamber is a subchamber system allowing researchers to add control of specific O2 levels within existing cell incubators without increasing the laboratory’s equipment footprint. Adding two or more ProOx C21 & C-Chamber hypoxia chambers helps provide simultaneous control at multiple oxygen levels over the full range of pathophysiologic values.
Xvivo System
The Xvivo System from BioSpherix Ltd is a hypoxia workstation combining one or more O2 incubators with attachable closed hoods. This provides non-varying hypoxic conditions during the entire cell experiment. The Xvivo System may be outfitted with multiple O2 incubators so investigators can perform experiments at different O2 tensions at the same time. The Xvivo System’s modular hypoxia hoods are connected to the incubator chamber(s) to permit cell handling and cell analysis under the same conditions found in the incubator.
