Clinical Mass Cytometry: A Bright Future Lies Ahead

In many diseases, monitoring the immune state is needed to better understand disease immune signature, progression and to predict a therapeutic response. However, due to its stratified and complicated nature, it is crucial to interrogate the immune profile and functionality in an in-depth high content mode. Mass cytometry technology has revolutionized high content single-cell analysis as it allows a precise phenotyping and distribution of nearly all immune cell subsets, as well as several functional characteristics - giving clinicians a bird’s eye view of the immune system state. Such analysis has major implications in the precision medicine era, as was recently illustrated in a melanoma study where the in-depth analysis could predict the response to anti-PD1 treatment. Alternatively, high dimensional analysis led to new unanticipated understanding like a novel immune alternation in a sepsis study. Utilizing mass cytometry has been shown in multiple clinical settings, including malignancy and autoimmunity, pregnancy, aging, sepsis, stroke recovery, and traumatic injury. While the advancements of mass cytometry were clearly manifested, some challenges still exist when trying to implement this technology in clinical studies, with emphasis on assay standardization and quality control. This talk will review some of the major advantages and challenges in the field.

Overall, adding this technology to the pool of technologies used in clinical studies will impact the way precision interventions will be taken based on the status of a patient’s immune state.