Dr. Mario Roederer
Revolutionizing Flow Cytometry
Nearly every major hospital in the world uses flow cytometers — high-speed, automated microscopes — for research and clinical analysis. Thanks to the work of Dr. Mario Roederer, scientists and medical professionals have better tools for analyzing flow cytometer data.
Along with Adam Treister at Stanford University’s prestigious Herzenberg Lab, Roederer wrote flow-cytometry analysis software called FlowJo — “jo” for jack-of-all trades — for the Mac.
In a major new revision for Mac OS X, FlowJo 6 brings the latest tools to the researcher’s desktop.
New Paradigm
“We had a real opportunity,” says Roederer of FlowJo, “to write analysis software that meets the needs of more research and medical groups than the traditional software that comes with cytometers.
“FlowJo was a completely new paradigm when we introduced it in 1997,” he says. “It’s much more biologically relevant and scientists understand it much better.”
Since then, demand for tools like FlowJo has grown. “More and more,” says Roederer, “researchers want to plug through a large number of samples at the machine but then go back to their desktops and carefully analyze the data.
“Many people do their analysis at the same station where the cytometer is,” he says, “but that paradigm is shifting and software like FlowJo is driving that shift.
Cytometry and the Mac
Roederer and Treister developed FlowJo for the Mac first because one of the major manufacturers of flow cytometers — Becton, Dickinson and Company — controlled 60% of the market and used the Mac for data collection. Some 15,000 to 20,000 of its cytometers in use today are Mac based.
Roederer also chose the Mac as the platform of choice for FlowJo because “at the time, in life sciences — particularly in research life sciences — probably 50 to 70% of research laboratories used Macs. It’s by far the most common analysis platform.”
Then, Roederer himself Is a Mac devotee.
“I learned it in 1986. I love It.”
“In life sciences — particularly in research life sciences — probably 50 to 70% of research laboratories used Macs. It’s by far the most common analysis platform.”
200 Interfaces
As a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon, Roederer had written a cytometry data acquisition and analysis program in Fortran and machine language.
“An old adage,” Roederer recalls, “says every program should be written twice from scratch. FlowJo benefited from my having gone through the process before; it’s one of the most complex single packages around, with more than 200 user interfaces.”
When Roederer began developing on the Mac, “there was a bit of a steep learning curve, because it was so different going from a line editor to an Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
“But once you get over that initial learning curve, it’s glorious.”
”A Huge Timesaver”
Having programmed in Fortran and machine language, “I couldn’t imagine working without an integrated debugger,” Roederer says.
“The ability to seamlessly toggle back and forth between the running application, the source code and the debugger allowed for a much faster turnaround of code.”
1 2 3 Next Page >
