Science published a breakthrough paper by Dr. Chloe Villani and colleagues from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. This work furthers our understanding of immune changes associated with human traits and diseases, and has resulted in the identification of entirely novel immune cell sub-populations.
In the Science publication, a novel combination of single cell ‘omics’ strategies, in-depth follow-up profiling, proteomics analyses, phenotypic characterization and functional studies on isolated cell subsets was able to overcome the inadequacies of previous methods of defining leukocyte populations. This analysis revealed the detailed biological landscape of human blood myeloid populations, enabling the discovery, re-classification and characterization of several novel cell subsets of dendritic cells, monocytes, and progenitors in health and disease.
As part of the proteomics contribution to this study, the Olink Inflammation panel was used to help characterize the cytokine responses of cultures of some of the newly identified dendritic cell sub-types.
In the words of Dr. Villani herself, “Upon implementing single cell profiling strategies and unbiased genomics classification to study human blood dendritic cells and monocytes, we used Olink’s protein panels as part of our follow-up experimental strategies to further phenotypically and functionally characterize newly uncovered immune cell subsets that were first validated through prospective isolation and single cell profiling. Our integrative experimental and analytical approaches revealed the detailed biological landscape of human blood myeloid populations in healthy state, enabling the discovery, re-classification and characterization of several novel cell subsets of dendritic cells, monocytes, and progenitors, thus significantly revising the taxonomy of these cells.”
You can read more about this work by visiting the information page on the Broad Institute website.