FOCIS Highlight: Using High Parameter Technology to Shape Immunotherapy

With the advances in high parameter single cell technologies such as flow cytometry and CyTOF, researchers now have access to a staggering amount of data at the individual cellular level. This data can provide critical insight into immune function, revealing clues to underlying disease mechanisms and even predict patient response to treatment.

During FOCIS 2019, Dr. Pratip K. Chattopadhyay, PhD gave an innovative talk on how high parameter flow cytometry and a new computational platform have been able to predict metastatic melanoma outcomes and patient response to specific immunotherapies using only a blood sample. Dr. Chattopadhyay and his team found biomarkers and a complex phenotype, that when present at low frequencies, predicted a favorable survival rate, and when present at higher frequencies indicated an unfavorable survival rate. Additionally, their methodologies were able to identify, with extremely high sensitivity, patients with metastatic melanoma from healthy controls using only the immune profile from a peripheral blood sample.

Critical to these findings, was Dr. Chattopadhyay and his team’s development of CytoBrute, a computational platform that performs rapid high parameter Boolean analysis. CytoBrute was able to reduce a process that traditionally takes 4 hours using R, down to just 7 seconds, enabling their findings.

For more information on high parameter single cell technologies, check out the paper published in the Annual Review of Analytical Chemistry, “High-Parameter Single-Cell Analysis.”