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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2017 Jul 1.
Published in final edited form as: Eur J Cancer. 2016 May 4;61:77–84. doi: 10.1016/j.ejca.2016.03.085

Figure 2. Systems immune monitoring in cancer therapy.

Figure 2

1) Acquisition of high quality tissue samples pre- and post-treatment is a critical element of human immune monitoring. Following processing into single cell suspension, smaller samples of 100,000 to 2 million cells are generally best analyzed immediately, whereas larger samples are typically cryopreserved as aliquots (58). 2) Next, single cells must be detected using a quantitative technique. This review focuses on mass cytometry, but many other flow, imaging, and sequencing based approaches now yield quantitative single cell information with sufficient cellular throughput. Critical to the analysis are software tools that cope with high dimensional data and provide human-readable single cell views (44, 59). 3) Finally, statistical models are derived that correlate cell subsets and biomarkers with clinical outcomes. This information can be used to develop new mechanistic models of cell to cell interactions and the impact of treatment on signaling networks within and between cells.