Mass cytometry technology from Fluidigm (South San Francisco, CA) is being used, along with the company's Maxpar Direct Immune Profiling Assay technology, in a prospective observational cohort surveillance study of up to 2000 adult participants hospitalized with COVID-19.
Ten U.S. medical institutions are involved in the study, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH; Bethesda, MD) and entitled Immunophenotyping Assessment in a COVID-19 Cohort (IMPACC). The study could help inform recommendations for COVID-19 care and potentially identify new strategies and optimal timing for experimental treatments.
Investigators at the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in collaboration with the Human Immunology Project Consortium and the Asthma and Allergic Diseases Clinical Research Consortium, are exploring how certain immunological responses correspond to, or may even predict, the clinical severity of COVID-19.
Mass cytometry enables high-dimensional single-cell characterization across diverse disease conditions, explains Adeeb Rahman, Ph.D., a core lab director for the IMPACC study and Associate Professor and Director of Technology Development at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai’s Human Immune Monitoring Center. When used with the Maxpar Direct Immune Profiling Assay, it allows comprehensive immune monitoring that is technically easy to execute and harmonize across multiple IMPACC study sites, he says.
“Mass cytometry has been integral in studying various aspects of immune responses to infectious disease,” said Ruth Montgomery, PhD, Professor of Internal Medicine at Yale School of Medicine, Director of the Yale CyTOF Facility and a principal investigator for the IMPACC study. “We have unique expertise at Yale utilizing this technology to analyze the immune cells in lung aspirates. As part of this study, we will perform analysis of peripheral blood and DNA sequencing, but we will also focus on lung airway cells from COVID-19 patients enrolled at all 10 sites. These studies may help us better understand the pathogenic mechanisms underlying the severe pneumonia often seen with COVID-19.”
As IMPACC study patients recover, investigators will continue to evaluate their immune responses to identify factors that may relate to long-term protection against re-infection.
Institutions participating in the study are Brigham and Women's Hospital; University Hospitals Case Medical Center; University of California, Los Angeles Department of Medicine; University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine; Drexel University College of Medicine; Emory University School of Medicine; Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; Oregon Health & Science University; Stanford Medicine’s Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy & Asthma Research; and Yale School of Medicine.