Immunology

Immune cells can be applied to many areas of therapeutics or pharmacological production, including:

• HSCs for stem cell therapies
• Gene therapy
• Diagnostic antibodies
• Therapeutic antibodies
• Cell-based immunotherapy
  • CAR-T/ CAR-NK immunotherapy
  • Dendritic vaccines
  • Tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs)

Immune cells are usually somewhat fragile cells that need to be processed quickly and efficiently to avoid affecting the viability of cells from an important sample. As one of the most morphologically complex groups of cells, they range from small and round, to heavily granulated to very sticky (dendritic cells).

Challenges in using immune cells

White blood cells (WBCs), also known as primary immune cells or peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs), for immunological research are usually isolated from whole blood samples of peripheral blood collected from donors.

Using a Ficoll density gradient, the PBMC-fraction is isolated from the red blood cells (RBCs) and platelets, which make up most of the blood components. From the PBMC isolate, the cells of interest are isolated using antibodies for identification. Flow sorting or magnetic beads are used for isolation. Other samples are derived from tissues, for example dendritic cells (DCs) from tumor samples, which are excised during surgery to collect the DCs for further tumor treatment.

In both processes, it is critical to know your cell count before and after isolation, to ascertain how efficient your isolation method is and the quantity of cells in your starting material. Bright-field microscopy and other cell identification and quantification methods will either wrongly identify your cell numbers, as they are not able to distinguish between nucleated and non-nucleated cells (RBCs), or they count the beads used to isolate your cells.

Solutions for immunological work