An organism is an amalgamation of different organs and organelles.

They all work together as an integrated team to keep us all living and breathing, - oh - and working hard of course, - just in case my boss is listening!

You are an organism which is a system made up of multiple different tissues. These tissues have individual cells which all function slightly differently – don’t worry they need to.

But we know, this isn’t always the case; cell function starts to go wrong and human disease occurs.

How do we effectively treat human disease? Well it follows that we need to get a look at the individual cells and their functions, so we can know when and how something goes wrong.

We can now take a tissue and disaggregate it, blast it apart into its individual components, into the individual cells.

We attach labels to the different cells so that we can identify them – in this case we label a white blood cell – it’s a T lymphocyte.

With fluorescence-activated cell sorting, there is an opportunity to pre wash the cells in order to remove contaminants, and preserve their viability then, cells are gently suspended in a stream fluid and then kept in a warm, cozy and soft liquid buffered environment.

Other technologies take a different approach.

Oh and reading the labels on millions of cells is not a problem with flow. It can read a million in less than a minute – and flow reads each cell one at a time.

When we “see” a cell that has a particular label we are interested in - the power of flow cytometry can be used to deposit it gently in PCR plate, BUT NOW we can also add its unique address. This ensures the individuality of the cell is never lost, always traceable and never confounded by contamination with other cells.

Once we have that single cell isolated we can, with next generation sequencing technology, dive into that individual cell to start reading its blueprints – this is in the form of DNA sequence, a, g, c, & t’s.

Now we have the complete picture!! The cell label type – the cell address and the cell DNA information, all specific – no more averages – every cell is unique.

You only know what’s corrupted if you know what’s normal, and so you’re comparing all these blueprint plans of all the individual cells, and that gives you the information that allows you to describe the organism –

- remember, not only is it a measure of “now” the present state, but more importantly how it’s likely to develop in its future state.

Just how does the individual cell apply to you -- the individual?

If we can detect something in your system that is predictive of some disease, we can employ a personalized medicine approach which could prevent this disease from developing further.

It could of course be as simple as a recommended diet – nothing too drastic – but would improve your quality of life.

It’s an impact on the patient, it’s an impact on individual healthcare, but it also has an impact on drug companies that are trying to produce drugs that impact that healthcare –

- because that here and now measurement and also that predictive measurement of cells allows us to target potentially troublesome cells- you know this is the cell that is going to proliferate and spoil it for everyone, could be its time to get rid of it.

The genomic revolution has allowed us to look at this in excruciating detail that we have never been able to do before.