Human Immune Monitoring Core: The role of the Human Immune Monitoring Core (HIMC) within this Cooperative Center for Translational Research on Human Immunology and Biodefense is to serve as a central facility for collecting, analyzing and storing clinical samples in order to maximize opportunities for parallel evaluations across all projects, running basic immune assays on our Luminex, flow cytometry and gene array platforms, and creating a steady flow of deidentified sample and experimental results into the Bioinformatics core that will then be organized and available to all project Pi's through that database. The HIMC includes a laboratory to receive processed samples from the clinical core and will also serve as a repository for materials, needed for future studies by the project Pi's.
The Specific Aims of the HIMC are:
Specific Aim 1 : Specialized Immune Monitoring assays. This Science Core will carry out of 42 plex Luminex assays on the serum to assess immune response of the patients at the time of blood draw, Agilent arrays to assess gene expression in whole blood and flow cytometry to phenotype leukocyte populations and to assess the proliferative response to specific cytokine and mitogen stimulation.
Specific Aim 2 : Centralized Assay Results database and analysis support. The Science Core will develop a repository for all patient samples run that will be linked to all archived samples, all data generated by the assays and all assays performed on data transferred to other projects with a unique barcode identifier. This ensures that all data and samples handled by the Core are deidentified in keeping with HPPAA regulations.
Data generated from this study will advance our understanding of how both the adaptive and innate immune system respond to influenza vaccination, which in turn will increase our knowledge of how influenza interacts with the immune system and develop indicators of immune function. In addition, technologies developed here may prove useful to advance clinical diagnostics for influenza and other pathogens.
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