Phasefocus
Peter Djali, Meetal Jotangia, Jessica Rickman
On Stand Workshop - Stand 38
T-cell based immunotherapy is an exciting emerging tool in the fight against cancer, with in vitro T-cell killing assays being the first step in validating the effectiveness of new therapies.
However current methods only tell a small part of the story, revealing only population-based metrics of cell death at particular timepoints, or at best looking at these death events kinetically. With no scope for cell-cell interaction kinetics or monitoring target cell proliferation and growth, this leaves a large gap in knowledge on why certain treatments are more efficacious than others. In an attempt to yield more information, current assays commonly depend upon time intensive manual tracking, or use of fluorescence imaging of T-cells, which are often primary cells, and highly sensitive to phototoxicity as a result.
In this workshop you’ll learn how, using Quantitative Phase Imaging (QPI) – a label free imaging technique, you can segment every cell. You’ll learn how, whilst protecting potentially fragile T-cells from any label, fluorescence is used to categorise between target cells, T-cells, and apoptotic cells. Delving under the hood of the advanced T-cell killing assay, you’ll see how Livecyte tracks every single target cell throughout the cell’s lifetime deriving a whole host of effector-cell: target cell kinetics and target cell information.
If that wasn’t enough, you’ll journey through the various dashboards generated from Livecyte's Analyse software to paint a full picture of T cell: target cell behaviour including the number of T-cell visits, total and average interaction time, as well the number of T-cells attached at death, and the contact time of final T-cell interaction. In parallel, our standard QPI metrics such as cell death, and total cell count, dry mass, a quantitative measure of the cellular biomass and morphology mean you can gain a complete picture of both T-cell and target cell behaviour and truly investigate the fundamental cellular mechanisms.
Meanwhile the T-cells remain entirely unlabelled, so your in vitro model is more physiologically relevant and more applicable to in vivo models.
