The application of immune-based therapies to augment the anti-tumor immune responses following autologous and allogeneic blood or marrow transplantation (BMT) has dramatically increase over the past several years. Reconstitution of the immune system following BMT, GVHD, and post-grafting immunosuppression may modify any immunotherapeutic approach. The need to carefully evaluate, and monitor the immune response in this setting has become increasingly apparent. The principle objective of the Human Immunology Core (Core C) is to serve as the centralized resource for the assessment of immunological monitoring of immune function in patients enrolled on the clinical trials. While there is great diversity in the therapeutic modalities being evaluated, most areas strongly overlap with regard to analysis and characterization of the immune response. A wide-variety of techniques that enumerate and characterize T cells, assess their functional behavior ex vivo, evaluate diversity of the response, characterize their gene expression signature as well as visualize multidimensional data using novel computational methods are available to the research projects within this P01.
The specific aims of the Immunology Core (Core C) are to: 1) Provide sophisticated immune monitoring assays for measuring patients? responses to immune therapies across projects. As a part of this aim, the Human Immunology core (Core C) will provide guidance and expertise to all investigators for the optimal integration of new high- quality correlative assays developed and utilized by the Core C for dissection of immunologic mechanisms, establish standard operating procedures and quality control for immunological assays that will be performed by the project investigators and implement the technical support; 2) Conduct assays and characterize the immune responses for specific clinical trials. As a part of this effort, the Immune Monitoring Core will serve as a repository for biospecimens, maintain the database for designated clinical trials and conduct in-depth mechanistic analysis associated with designated clinical trials conducted under Projects 1-4.
Immune Monitoring Core Project Narrative The Immune Monitoring Core will be a central hub for developing, standardizing and conducting high-quality correlative assays for dissection of the immunologic mechanisms of interest for all investigators on this P01. The incorporation of the state-of-the-art technologies offered by this core into the analysis of immunological endpoints of the clinical trials proposed by all four Projects is expected to provide critical insights into mechanisms of action, disease response, and possible adverse events of the studied novel immunotherapies.
