The Crow’s Nest Biopsy Catchment System is an unusual new product:
- Used by interventional radiologists
- The device is a novel multi-container device that allows a physician to capture dislodged tumor cells (DTCs) instead of leaving them on the needle, which is of course headed to the medical waste container.
- Enables molecular testing from small (core needle biopsy) pathology specimens without depleting them – by capturing dislodged cells from the needle before it is discarded.
- Its purpose is to create two specimens out of each core needle biopsy
- One specimen from the solid tissue and the other from the loose dislodged cells that ride along on the biopsy needle and would otherwise be thrown away.
It's simple to use
Immediately after you perform a core needle biopsy, you remove a Crow’s Nest Biopsy Catchment System from its packaging and unscrew the lid. You then insert the tip of the biopsy needle containing the tissue into the top of the Crow’s Nest, submerging the needle and the tissue all the way into the receptacle containing the provided sterile phosphate buffer (PBS) solution. Vigorously swirl the needle, dislodging the tissue in the liquid. You’ve just released the cells from the needle!
Then, unscrew and remove the top of the Crow’s Nest at the midpoint. Invert the top of the Crow’s Nest, and pour the contents (the solid tissue and the liquid PBS containing loose dislodged cells) into the blue basket sieve.
Next, remove the basket sieve with the tissue from the 25 mL collection tube, and drop it in an open formalin cup labeled with the patient’s demographics. That’s the standard specimen, ready to be sent to a pathology laboratory for routine FFPE.
Finally, place the Crow’s Nest lid on the 25 mL collection tube, and screw it in place. That’s the new specimen, ready for molecular testing.
You’ve just created two specimens from what would have been just one, doubling the value of what you extracted from the patient.
Saving Cells That Would Otherwise be Lost
When you use a Crow’s Nest after you perform a core needle biopsy, you save and preserve a valuable biologic resource that is normally lost to medical waste – the dislodged tumor cells (DTCs) from the micro-trauma of the CNB procedure.
The use of this device takes nothing additional from your patient. But the benefits are:
(a) some patients will avoid a second biopsy because of the availability of these dislodged tumor cells for genomic screening
(b) some patients will qualify for precision medicine clinical trials who otherwise wouldn’t know that they qualify, and
(c) all biopsied patients can benefit from Next Generation Screening (NGS) of confirmed tumor tissue from the biopsied specimen.
This stands in contrast to the often-indeterminate findings from the evaluation of possible circulating tumor cells from a peripheral blood sample.
If you would like to order a sample Crow’s Nest to use after your next core needle biopsy, click here.
If you’re not using a Crow’s Nest after a core needle biopsy of a tumor, you are throwing away some of the cells you harvest from the patient!
If you are interested in trying this yourself, contact us and let us arrange for your hospital to be a Crow’s Nest alpha testing center, and for you to be among the early IRs to perform Biopsy Catchment™.
Interventional Radiologists
