Adoptive immunotherapy is a technique that can help fight tumors by training large numbers of T cells to attack the particular cancer cells present in a patient. This can be a difficult process because a large number of cell-cell interactions have to be monitored in order to spot the immune cells that are creating the wanted reactions. A collaboration between University of Houston and the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center has led to the development of a new system that can screen large numbers of immune effector cells interacting with tumor cells.
The system called TIMING, for Time-lapse Imaging Microscopy in Nanowell Grids, can go through tens of thousands of cell interactions and can be adapted for applications outside of immunotherapy, essentially wherever tracking of biological cells in large quantities is important to find a needle in a haystack.
TIMING works thanks to tiny wells within which pairs of cells spend quality time close together. A microscope camera films thousands of these wells, essentially at the same time, while a supercomputer is used to analyze the videos for visual changes.
Study in Bioinformatics: Automated profiling of individual cell–cell interactions from high-throughput time-lapse imaging microscopy in nanowell grids (TIMING)…
Source: University of Houston…
