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Patrick Frost, a professor at UCLA recently spoke to our US distributor, HypOxygen, about his work and how it is benefitted by the use of a Whitley H35 Hypoxystation. Professor Frost is investigating how the adaptive hypoxic response in mutiple myeloma cells affects tumor progression, hoping to provide insight into the pathology and chemotherapy resistance of this incurable disease.
Patrick Frost has been using the Whitley H35 Hypoxystation for almost 3 years now, and he does not miss bygone days in the lab: “We started out with just a Plexiglas box, with some valves in it, with a front cover just held on magnetically, placed inside an incubator. We would burn through a 50 L tank of nitrogen in 48 hours. I was never convinced that we had the correct level of oxygen in there”.
Now, despite two groups using the H35 intensely at 0.2 % oxygen, that gas bottle can easily last a month. Dr. Frost says, “If we shut the workstation down, the atmosphere stays stable, we don’t lose the hypoxia. It’s been a year since we replaced the CO2 bottle, and the compressed air.” Don Whitley Scientific has conducted gas consumption studies that show the Whitley H35 Hypoxystation “at rest” uses only 3.5 L of nitrogen gas/24 hour period, 47 and 28 times less than other hypoxia workstations. Part of the reason for the stability of that atmosphere is the annealed, thick acrylic build of the Hypoxystation. Dr. Frost states, “It’s pretty robust, it’s survived a move and a forklift and it never sprung a leak throughout. “
Read more about the Patrick Frost’s investigation here.
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