ICCS COMMITTEE  NEWS & UPDATES
ICCS is excited to share updates on each of the committee's. Please review the below and feel free to contact us at [email protected] with any questions. 


ADVOCACY COMMITTEE
By, Jerry Hussong
The ICCS Advocacy Committee has been busy monitoring numerous important issues that likely will have an effect on the practice of flow cytometry.  These include changes in regulation, reimbursement and accreditation.  The Advocacy Committee has communicated with the State of New York regarding their relatively recent requirement of reporting double negative and double CD4/CD8 positive populations when evaluating CD4/CD8 counts.  This change may require labs to convert from using an IVD kit to establishing a laboratory developed test (LDT) to quantitate these populations. 

Significant effort has also gone into working with stakeholders regarding current and imminent cuts to reimbursement for flow cytometry services in the CLFS.  While new cuts in reimbursement have already started this year, this committee and others are looking at how to mitigate the ongoing cuts in reimbursement for flow cytometry services. 

We continue to follow any new developments regarding the release of the FDA’s proposed regulation of LDTs.  It remains unclear if the FDA will issue their final guidance this calendar year or allow for a legislative solution to this issue.  Clearly, the classification of flow cytometry services as low, moderate or high risk will be extremely important to our membership.

This committee welcomes the input of the ICCS membership, including the suggestion of new issues the committee should focus.  In addition, if membership or ad hoc participation on the advocacy committee is of interest to you, please contact ICCS staff.


EDUCATION COMMITTEE
By, Fiona Craig
The Education committee is divided into four subcommittees that work on producing a variety of types of educational content for ICCS members. 

Four newsletters are released annually, and include invited articles on a wide range of topics and a Case Study Interpretation (CSI) case.  The Fall issue of the newsletter will be released soon, and contains the ICCS 2016 annual meeting plenary reports, Part II in the series on managing a flow lab: CAP readiness from Jolene Cardinali and Bruce Grieg, and an article about flow cytometry for Sezary cells from Pedro Horna.  If you have an interesting case to share, please follow the link from the ICCS home page to the CSI case submission portal.

The video subcommittee has just completed a video about light chain assessment for B-cells, which will soon join the other videos available to members on the ICCS website: B-cell maturation, the blasts cell gate and plasma cells.  Also visit the website for a selection of online presentations, including the most recently posted presentation by Weina Chen on immunophenotyping B-cell neoplasms.

The new e-learning subcommittee is creating materials that will get you involved in performing a learning activity and then testing your knowledge, and could be used in the future to obtain continuing education credits.  Stay tuned for the first ICCS e-learning activity about acute myeloid leukemia.

Have a Question about flow, we’ll provide the Answer.  The Q&A subcommittee has recently posted answers to two new questions about optical alignment and PNH reporting.  Also, let us know if you’d like to get involved in writing answers to posted questions.

QUALITY & STANDARDS
COMMITTEE
By, Andrea Illingworth
The Quality and Standards committee is currently based on 4 different subgroups (instrument optimization, reagents and panels, sample preparation and reporting. Its purpose is to "identify major areas of variability, determine critical components needing standardization, develop and define acceptability standards and criteria, and provide guidance and measures for practical implementation in the laboratory".

This information will be peer-reviewed and disseminated in the form of "modules" on the ICCS website available to both ICCS members and non-members. We are currently working on several modules (“Optimizing voltages and compensation” (BC and BD platform), "Identifying appropriate reagents to assess CD5 expression”, "Developing standards for acceptability for the quality of an antibody” and "Effect of various lysing reagents on antibody staining“ which should be available soon.