Abstract Book 2010 - CIMT Annual Meeting

030 Brix | Immune monitoring
MHC Dextramers: improved detection of antigen-specific T-cells
in fluid samples and in situ
Liselotte Brix, Tina Jakobsen, and Henrik Pedersen
Immudex, Copenhagen, Denmark
Sensitive and reliable monitoring of cellular immune
responses is becoming increasingly important in
vaccine and immunotherapeutic development.
Flow analysis using fluorescent MHC multimers
has made a great impact in this field enabling visualization,
enumeration and phenotypic characterization
of antigen specific T-cells. Here we discuss
how MHC Dextramers, a new generation of MHC
multimer reagents, can be used for advanced detection
of antigen specific T-cells in comprehensive
applications.
MHC Dextramer reagents carry a higher number
of MHC-molecules and more fluorochromes than
conventional MHC multimers. This increases their
avidity for the specific T-cell and enhances their
staining intensity, thereby increasing resolution and
the signal-to-noise ratio. Furthermore the dextran
backbone of the MHC Dextramer stabilizes the attached
MHC-molecules and fluorochrome proteins.
This allows specialized applications such as in situ
staining (e.g. detection of antigen-specific T-cells
in frozen tissue sections), detection of very rare
events, combined staining with high numbers of
MHC Dextramer reagents in same tube and MHC
Dextramer staining combined with extracellular
and intracellular staining for e.g. surface proteins
and cytokines.
Such specialized applications are useful in improving
immune monitoring of cancer immunotherapeutics.
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