What does PARR tell me about my patient’s specimen?

PARR, which stands for PCR for Antigen Receptor Rearrangements, is used to discriminate between lymphoma/leukemia and reactive/inflammatory conditions when cytology is equivocal. Our canine PARR assay detects the expansion of B-cell cancer clones by amplifying the VJ region of the immunoglobulin heavy chain gene (IgH) and detects the expansion of T-cell cancer clones by amplifying a region in the T-cell receptor gamma chain gene.

Other Questions

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Which cancers can I use ImpriMed for? or What type of cancer does ImpriMed predict?

Currently, our services are for canine lymphoma and leukemia. We will be expanding our services to other species and other blood / lymphoid cancers in the near future.

Is there any reason to believe that submitting another sample to you would provide any additional information or possible changes in treatment protocols now that we are almost 4 months into the treatment plan?

We would suggest you submit another FNA and blood samples to us WHEN the patient's lymphoma relapses. Relapse of lymphoma means that the cancer develops a resistance to certain chemo drugs in use. When this happens, the relapsed cancer cells are usually different from the ones investigated in the naive status, which led to different drug response predictions to the tested drugs. Therefore, it would be better to get new tumor samples and find out what are the new preferred drugs and which of the used drugs still remain effective or became resistant for the relapsed lymphoma. However, the best scenario is to maintain clinical remission for as long a period of time so that you don’t have to order another service from us! If a second service is needed, we offer a 50% discount for returning patients.

What type of sample is needed – just aspirates and a typical flow sample?

We need about 10 million cancer cells to run the full chemosensitivity panel so we ask that you conduct an aggressive woodpecker style FNA, poking as many nodes as possible and putting the cells into our proprietary media tubes (ensures we receive live cells), then of course we need a whole blood sample (2mL).

How much research do you have to support your results?

All of our products are thoroughly validated in-house using clinical outcomes data and we have published multiple peer-reviewed papers demonstrating the efficacy of our predictions (Veterinary Sciences and Veterinary and Comparative Oncology). We have run over 12,000 tests on hematopoietic cells, and over 4,000 canine patients that have benefited from our services. We believe we have more data on canine lymphoma than any other company in the world.

I have a patient with likely lymphoma/leukemia. For a blood sample, can I just submit an EDTA blood tube or do I still use the ImpriMed tubes (and if so, how many tubes and is an additional EDTA blood tube still needed with that)?

If the patient is suspected of leukemia, blood collected in the EDTA tube should be fine. If it is lymphoma, we might need FNA from the affected organ/lymph node. We can suggest FNA in ImpriMed media tube (1) and 2ml of blood sample in an EDTA tube.