Flow cytometry is a powerful technique for characterizing immune responses to vaccines, immunotherapeutic drugs, and other clinical interventions. But many preclinical and clinical studies may take place at sites that are not in the same location as the flow cytometry lab. That’s why it’s critical to determine how clinical specimens should be collected, processed, stored, and shipped to assure that cells will be viable and abundant enough for flow cytometry analysis.

With the rapid progress of immune-modulating drug development, flow cytometry has found itself increasingly at the forefront of clinical trial assessment of safety and efficacy. This is not without challenges since flow cytometry analysis can be complicated and expensive, too often employs idiosyncratic experimental and analytical methods. So how can a platform without standardized methods and processes, be successfully applied to evaluate clinical endpoints?

With the rapid progress of immune-monitoring drug development, flow cytometry has found itself increasingly at the forefront of clinical trial assessment of safety and efficacy. This is not without challenges since flow cytometry analysis can be complicated and expensive, too often employs idiosyncratic experimental and analytical methods. So how can a platform without standardized methods and processes, be successfully applied to evaluate clinical endpoints? Several novel approaches to instrument calibration and experimental design are now helping to establish the harmonization of flow cytometry across multiple clinical labs. In this blog, we explore the importance of flow cytometry instrument setup and maintenance when analyzing samples from clinical trials.

What is the primary role of Natural Killer (NK) cells? Natural killer (NK) cells are the predominant innate immune cells that mediate anti-tumor and anti-viral responses, and therefore possess good clinical utilization (Abel et al. 2018). Natural killer cells comprise 10–15% of peripheral blood lymphocytes and classically display a half-life of approximately 7–10 days in the circulation (Moretta et al. 2000).

At KCAS, we work with Director, VP, and C-level pharmaceutical and biotech executives that need to measure their drug or the effect of their drug in biological matrix. Many of our customers rely on…