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The FAST track to better health
Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre is branching out into medical science
Economist.com Technology Monitor, April 28, 2008
Excerpts from the article:
IMAGINE a world in which the same company controlled both personal computers and photocopiers. That world nearly happened. The core of the personal computer—its icon-based graphical interface controlled by the click of a mouse—was invented not by Apple, nor by IBM or Microsoft, but by Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC). The response of the company's managers, though, was indifference. They told the inventors to get back to their day-jobs of improving document reproducers. Those researchers then showed their invention to a young man called Steve Jobs, and the rest is history.
That failure of imagination has haunted the firm ever since, so PARC's latest venture outside Xerox's core competence is getting a more sympathetic hearing. Which is just as well, for it is a long way outside. It is a way of finding rare, disease-related cells in the bloodstream.
At the moment, doctors (or, rather, their minions) who want to look for cancerous cells in a patient's blood normally use a microscope linked to a computer. The Fibre Array Scanning Technology (FAST) cytometer, developed in conjunction with the Scripps Research Institute, uses an array of optical fibres and a laser beam instead...
As a result, it may be that FAST sees its first applications on those who are at the beginnings of their lives, rather than facing the ends of them. For PARC's researchers think the technique could be used to replace amniocentesis...
Using FAST in this way faces fewer regulatory hurdles than using it to monitor chemotherapy, and PARC hopes to present its method to America's Food and Drug Administration for approval next year. And, although Xerox may prefer to license FAST out to others with better expertise in the field of medical devices, rather than making and selling it in-house, you can be sure that this time the firm will not allow anyone else to walk off with it scot-free.
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