The 5th BD Biosciences, India and The Cytometry Society Award was bagged by Reecha Shah, a research scholar from the lab of Dr Padma Shastry at National Centre for Cell Sciences, Pune.

The recipient won the award for her paper elucidating molecular mechanism of sodium valproate (VPA) potentiating the cytotoxic effects of anti-cancer drugs. The study provides new information on the possible utility of VPA, a commonly used anti-epileptic drug, in combination chemotherapy.

It was in 2009, that BD and The Cytometry Society instituted an award for Excellence in Flow Cytometry to recognize the creative use of flow cytometry as a tool to address problems in clinical research.

It includes a cash prize of Rs. 1 lakh and a citation. This year 5th BD-TCS Award Function was held at Bhubaneshwar, Odisha which also hosted the 1st BD-TCS Award function in 2009.

“We believe this will go a long way in motivating life science research specifically by using Flow cytometry. Flow technology can be gainfully employed much more for research or clinical purposes,” said YS Prabhakara, business director, BD Biosciences in India.

Flow Cytometry has been recognized as one of the important technologies that transformed the face of modern life science and biotechnology research in India. The technology has seen continuous improvement in multicolour analysis, high speed cell sorting, new fluorochromes, innovative reagent portfolios, and new emerging applications in health care research. It allows scanning of millions of cells in minimum time and cells of interest can be further tagged with suitable add-ons to study their various characteristics. Flow Cytometry is a count and measure of the physical and chemical characteristics of numerous biological particles such as cells, cell subsets, DNA, surface antigens and bacteria.