The University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine and the campus Research Resources Center (RRC), request funds for a state-of-the-art cell sorter from the Shared Instrumentation Grant Program. Within the last three years, the number of basic science and clinical science researchers requiring flow cytometry has tripled. The primary reason for the increased demand for flow cytometry stems from the successful recruitment of a number of new faculty members (Bellur Prabhakar, PhD, Jim Cook, MD, Cristiana Rastellini, MD, Richard Ye, MD, PhD, Bin He, PhD, Oscar Colamonici, MD. Mahmood Ghassemi, PhD, Jianxun Li, PhD, Tom Hope, PhD, Prasad Kanteti, PhD, Zuoming Sun, PhD, etc). The Cancer Center and the Dept. of Pathology with new Heads, are each in the process of recruiting 8-10 new researchers and the Dept. of Ophthalmology is recruiting a new cular immunologist. These recruitments will in crease the demand for research instrumentation like flow cytometry.The secondary reason driving our request for a new flow cytometer is that our NIH funding has doubled in the last 4-5 years due to our university's commitment to expand and strengthen basic and clinical science programs in the areas of genetics, cancer research, organ transplantation, cell biology, immunology and infectious diseases, further increasing the demand for and access to a state-of-the-art flow cytometer. At present, the RRC, a campus core facility, houses a Flow Cytometry Laboratory with an earlier generation Coulter flow cytometer, an Epics Elite ESP, acquired in 1995, that lacks the sorting speed, precision and versatility required of today's advanced technology applications. Even this instrument is no longer manufactured and thus parts and service will not be available beyond 2004. making an upgrade of the instrument not prudent. Increased demand for flow cytometry due to enhanced research activity through new faculty recruitment and the decommissioning of the Epics 753 have created an acute need for a new flow cytometer. Technologically advanced flow cytometers (Coulter Altra, Becton Dickinson FACS Vantage SE and Cytomation MoFlo) are now available with improved sorting speed, sorting precision, biohazard protection, multicolor analysis and other applications required for contemporary research in cell biology, immunology and infectious diseases. Careful evaluation of the three available systems prompted our users group to recommend the BD FACS Vantage SE since it would satisfy the needs of our institution's NIH-funded investigators.
