A remarkable number of opinion papers estimate that biomarkers on patient populations could lead to cost savings of $80 billion per year in streamlining PLX-4720 clinical trials, yet one important facet of biomarker development, viable whole white blood markers, is conspicuously absent. The use of Ficoll for the separation of blood into PBLs and RBCs was introduced in 1968. Since then it has become the mainstay for the separation of white blood cells and remains the method of choice in many clinical laboratories. Even so, Ficoll gradient separations result in poor quality PBLs combined with low yields and poor viability. The literature shows that there are potential problems with Ficoll separations, such as contamination with iodine , loss or death of specific subpopulations of lymphocytes and changes in expression of adhesion molecules. Also the use of Ficoll has failed to lead to any standardized biomarkers from whole blood nor did it lead to the easy standardization of biomarkers in clinical trials that depend on viable lymphocytes. In this project we hypothesized that the poor or missing biomarkers based on whole blood lymphocyte preparations is likely due to inadequacies in the upfront process of whole blood cell separations. We reasoned that the decades old methods of whole blood cell separations were perhaps losing the cells of interest or the cells of interest were dying due to the harsh isolation conditions. Recent world-wide Vorinostat technology to isolate subpopulations of blood cells has been developed and these methods now frequently utilize paramagnetic particles coated with antibodies against specific cell surface markers to separate the white blood cells of interest. In addition, it is important to note that the methods as presented and further developed here can be performed on whole blood without the need to lyse the red blood cells nor enrich the lymphocytes using pre-processing steps that often involve gradient centrifugations. Our need for improved blood cell isolation methods has led us to the development of the automated magnetic separation methods that are the subject of this paper. In general, the isolation of white blood cells from whole blood is difficult and biologically hampered by the fact that the blood contains red blood cells that exceed the number of white blood cells by more than 700 to 1. Separations are further hindered by the viscosity of whole blood, the presence of serum proteins and the large number of cells per ml of blood.