The Fine Balance of Immunology
The immune system often plays a role in the onset and progression of different disorders such as autoimmunity, fibrosis, and cancer. Understanding which cell types, cytokines, pathways, and transcription factors are involved in the balance between immune activation and suppression can lead to better treatments for chronic inflammation and disease. In addition to traditional bulk expression and proteomic analysis, spatial profiling of the location of immune cells in tissue can yield a better understanding of disease pathogenesis, uncovering differences within individuals as well as novel biomarkers for stratification and treatment.
Challenges
We know it’s a challenge as an immunologist to piece together what underlies healthy versus exhausted or abnormal immune system function. Projects often involve many different research techniques, cell types, and biomolecules and you may be working with a variety of sample types. Even more of a challenge is understanding how different immune cells and biomolecules function and communicate in situ in the tissue in response to disease.
How much could you advance your understanding of the immune system if you had access to a multiplexed technology platform for transcriptomic and proteomic analysis of multiple sample types such as Formalin-Fixed, Paraffin-Embedded (FFPE) tissue sections, fresh frozen tissue, cell lysates, PBMCs and whole blood? Make an impact on human health faster with streamlined bulk and spatial analysis of RNA, protein, and immune cell types using the combined power of the nCounter® Analysis System and the GeoMx® Digital Spatial Profiler.
Featured Solutions
Choose from curated, multiplexed nCounter Gene Expression Panels, nCounter Vantage 3D™ Protein Assays, GeoMx DSP RNA Assays, and/or GeoMx Protein Assays to build your next experiment and discover answers to your immunology questions. Take advantage of embedded immune cell typing signatures in nCounter expression panels to quantify the relative abundance of 14 different immune cell types or run an nCounter panel downstream of FACs to profile specific immune cell populations.
Publications
The spatial landscape of lung pathology during COVID-19 progression.
Recent studies have provided insights into the pathology and immune response to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)1–8. However, thorough interrogation of the interplay between infected cells and the immune system at sites of infection is lacking.
Spatial mapping of SARS-CoV-2 and H1N1 Lung Injury Identifies Differential Transcriptional Signatures.
Severe SARS-CoV-2 infection often leads to development of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), with profound pulmonary patho-histological changes post-mortem. It is not clear if ARDS from SARS-CoV-2 is similar to that observed in Influenza H1N1, another common viral cause of lung injury.
In-silico performance, validation, and modeling of the Nanostring Banff Human Organ transplant gene panel using archival data from human kidney transplants
RNA gene expression of renal transplantation biopsies is commonly used to identify the immunological patterns of graft rejection. Mostly done with microarrays, seminal findings defined the patterns of gene sets associated with rejection and non-rejection kidney allograft diagnoses.
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