HIGH-THROUGHPUT, HIGH-SENSITIVITY AND COST-EFFECTIVE MONITORING OF INNATE AND ADAPTIVE IMMUNE RESPONSES AT SINGLE CELL LEVEL

Accelerating preclinical and clinical developments in the field of immunotherapy against cancer and challenging infectious diseases have highlighted the need to monitor immune responses from large sample collections with sufficient sensitivity, robustness, while keeping costs withing reasonable limits.

Enzyme-linked immunosorbent spot (ELISPOT) has long been used as a workhorse for this purpose, but is typically restricted to monitoring cellular release of one analyte (eg antibody, cytokine) at the same time. The ability to measure multiple analytes simultaneously provides a much-needed additional layer of information with important biological and clinical implications, as is illustrated by the importance monitoring of poly-functional T-cells in cancer vaccine studies. Fluorospot technology enables this by allowing multiplexed detection of single-cell release of multiple analytes at the same time. In this project we propose to enrich the arsenal of immunomonitoring equipment of our faculty with the latest generation of fluorospot readers, characterized by high sensitivity, ease-of-use and robustness to enable multi-analyte detection with single cell resolution.