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Systems Immunity Research Institute

Immunophenotyping capabilities

Together with our partners at Cardiff and Vale University Hospital and Velindre Cancer Centre, we bring together scientists and clinicians with an interest in translational immunotherapy.

Whilst a large range of novel immunotherapeutics are being tested in diseases ranging from inflammation to cancer, there is often a gap in our understanding of the biological mechanisms underpinning treatment response. There is also a need for biomarkers to assess treatment success.

We support a substantial depth and breadth of immunological expertise in investigating biological mechanisms of disease, biomarkers of treatment success as well as the identification of the correlates of antigen-specific immunity. Selected areas of expertise include (but are not limited to):

Antibody:

  • Development and use of serological assays for measuring vaccine-induced immunity.
  • High-containment (BSL3) laboratories for measuring neutralizing virus-specific antibody responses.
  • Development and measurement of functional non-neutralizing antibody responses (e.g., ADCC, ADCP, CDC) against live virus.
  • Ability to isolate, sequence, and re-express antigen-specific antibodies from human donors for monoclonal/repertoire analysis.

T cells:

  • High throughput assays for measuring antigen-specific T cell responses (e.g., ELISPOT and whole blood assays including accredited assays).
  • Bespoke high-definition (~50 colours) analysis of antigen-specific T cell immunity and phenotype (e.g. stem cell memory, and other correlates of protective vaccine-induced cellular immunity).
  • T cell sorting / cloning for TCR repertoire analyses.

Virology/Functional Assays:

  • Significant experience working with a wide range of pathogens including current concerns such as HCMV, SARS-CoV-2, and Influenza.
  • Leading expertise in mouse models of viral infection, including facilities for high-containment (BSL3) challenge experiments.
  • Established track record in developing and exploiting cell-based assays for studying the capacity of pathogen-specific T cells and pathogen-induced NK cell responses to provide functional control of virus infection/spread in vitro.

Complement:

  • Internationally leading expertise in complement biology, roles of complement in disease and complement therapeutics.
  • Established and validated assay sets to measure complement components, regulators, activation products and functional activity in biological fluids and tissues in man and models.
  • Combining complement biomarkers with complement genetics to further interrogate relevance to disease.

Lipidomics:

  • We have the capabilities to perform bespoke lipidomic analysis – to be discussed on a case-by-case basis.

Collaborations

We work in collaboration with Biotech, Pharma and our local Clinical Research Organisations, ImmunoServ, TeloNostiX and CanSense.

ImmunoServ

The team at ImmunoServ can design and deliver custom work packages tailored to your specific research projects, performing pre-established or customised immunoassays as required.

More information on ImmunoServ is available here.

TeloNostiX

TeloNostiX is an in vitro diagnostics company that provides high-resolution telomere length analysis for clinical and research applications. Based on Single Telomere Length Analysis (STELA), TeloNostiX’s platform technologies have applications for the prognosis and prediction of response to treatment for individual cancer patients, risk-adapted clinical trials, cellular therapeutics and telomere-related disorders.

More information on TeloNostiX is available here.

CanSense

CanSense delivers an accurate, non-invasive, inexpensive blood test to diagnose bowel cancer early.

More information on CanSense is available here.