Counts of activated blood eosinophils for monitoring asthma

The FOG method is a new cell membrane permeabilization technique which makes it possible to identify the eosinophils in unseparated peripheral blood and allows analyses of both surface and intracellular antigens by flow cytometry. This technique has been adapted to analyse eosinophil activity in peripheral blood from asthmatic patients by measuring the expression of the EG2-epitope on intracellular ECP.