Fluidigm CyTOF® technology with the Maxpar® Direct™ Immune Profiling Assay™ provides best-in-class immune monitoring with the cost, flexibility and consistency needed for standardized COVID-19 disease immune monitoring research. Imaging Mass Cytometry™ adds the capability of spatial visualization of immune response in tissue samples. This newly developed technology enables the study of clinical outcomes and changes in inflammatory or immune function directly from whole blood samples or tissues.
Many questions remain unanswered in COVID-19 disease research:
- What immunologic features and molecular mechanisms are involved in COVID-19 severity?
- Can those at risk of severe symptoms be identified early?
- What interventions can help to reduce severity, and why do they work?
- What can immune infiltrates tell us about the aftermath of infection?
- Which vaccine candidates are most effective?
Fluidigm mass cytometry and Imaging Mass Cytometry systems, powered by CyTOF technology, are being used by researchers around the world to help find answers to these and many other important questions to understand the unprecedented COVID-19 disease.
Learn how we can support COVID-19 disease research in many different ways
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Maxpar Direct Immune Profiling Assay | |
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High-dimensional spatial visualization and phenotyping | |
Immune profiling to better understand the immune response to COVID-19
Obtaining an information-rich profile of the features and functionality of a patient’s immune system during the course of infection or in response to therapy is of critical importance.
The Maxpar Direct Immune Profiling System provides an ideal solution for such longitudinal immune monitoring studies with either whole blood or PBMC samples.
The convenient single-tube format and easy workflow allow many patient samples to be processed in a single day.
Processed samples can be frozen and saved or shipped for collection on a Helios™ mass cytometer at a later time or distant location.
The pushbutton analytic software, Maxpar Pathsetter™, identifies and enumerates 37 immune cell populations in 5 minutes or less and requires no special expertise to use.
View the high-quality data delivered by the system.
See how the Maxpar Direct Immune Profiling Assay is being used to study immune response to COVID-19:
Hadjadj, J., Yatim, N., Barnabei, L. et al. “Impaired type I interferon activity and exacerbated inflammatory responses in severe COVID-19 patients.” Science (2020): eabc6027
Lori Turner, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, is using the Maxpar Direct Immune Profiling System in her clinical study
Watch a webinar: Bring the power of CyTOF to COVID-19 research: Mass cytometry in infectious disease.
Want to analyze COVID-19 patient samples by CyTOF? Download a list of CyTOF facilities.
High-dimensional spatial tissue imaging in COVID-19 disease research
High-plex spatial profiling of the host immune response can enable deep biological insight using the Hyperion™ Imaging System to perform Imaging Mass Cytometry (IMC™). Visualization and quantification of immune infiltrates in COVID-19 tissue samples are becoming an important IMC application.
Researchers using IHC can benefit from the high-dimensional spatial visualization that IMC offers
An early COVID-19 publication showing the histopathology of lung tissue from a critically ill patient was submitted by Luo et al. In “Clinical pathology of critical patient with novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19)” (Preprints, 2020), the authors describe their research to understand the pathogenesis and severity of the disease.
This team utilized immunohistochemistry (IHC) to positively identify several markers in immune infiltrates in a lung biopsy sample. The results suggested the general spatial context of the cells present focally in lung interstitium and near blood vessels.
A short summary of the publication results is included in the Fluidigm article Imaging Mass Cytometry Publication Review. After the summary, commentary from Fluidigm introduces how researchers using IHC could benefit from using the Hyperion Imaging System to characterize lung tissue from COVID-19 or other diseases. Certainly, IHC results demonstrate how this approach can be used to spatially assess immune infiltration. However, by leveraging IMC, deeper insights from profiling many markers in a single scan could be achieved while minimizing the use of precious disease tissue samples. The article includes an example of lung tissue visualized using IMC to look at multiple markers in the same scan.
Other Imaging Mass Cytometry references to support COVID-19 research: The information and links below describe how IMC might be incorporated into infectious disease studies, such as those for COVID-19.
In this publication a team from Yale discusses how it used IMC to investigate Zika virus infection. Uraki, R. et al. “Aedes aegypti AgBR1 antibodies modulate early Zika virus infection of mice.” Nature Microbiology 4 (2019): 948–955.
Watch this 10-minute presentation by one of the authors of the Nature Microbiology publication, Ruth Montgomery, PhD, Professor of Internal Medicine, Director of the Yale CyTOF Facility and Associate Dean for Scientific Affairs. In this webinar, “Profiling of COVID-19 patient immune responses,” Montgomery discusses her COVID-19 research.
Watch this webinar by Tom Ashhurst, PhD, High‐Dimensional Cytometry Specialist at the Sydney Cytometry Facility. In the webinar titled “Mapping dynamic immunity across time, space, and disease state,” Ashhurst describes how he uses mass cytometry and Imaging Mass Cytometry to better understand viral diseases of the central nervous system.
Other valuable resources for understanding how IMC can be used in COVID-19 disease research are located above.