BD – Becton, Dickinson and Company, which is a leading global medical technology company, on December 18 announced a strategic collaboration with the Institute for Immunology and Immune Health – I3H at the University of Pennsylvania in order to advance its research when it comes to deep human immune profiling and also support the development as far as immune-mediated therapies are concerned.
This partnership goes on to include developing and validating a high-parameter flow cytometry panel that can go ahead and capture major functional pathways when it comes to whole blood, including phosphorylation markers, which go on to offer powerful insight into how the single cells respond to drugs or the disease states.
The flow cytometry panel, apparently, is going to support a planned 1,000-patient immune profiling study, which would be in partnership with the Penn Colton Center for Autoimmunity and is anticipated to begin this summer. The project is going to make utmost use of the BD FACSDiscover™ A8 Cell Analyzer, BD Rhapsody™ System, and BD reagents and software, as well as informatics, with BD teams managing reagents and instrumentation along with spectral data algorithms, and also I3H teams going ahead and serving as scientific and clinical leads. The team looks forward to publishing a peer-reviewed manuscript that would describe the results of the study.
According to Richard and Barbara Schiffrin President’s Distinguished Professor, director of the Institute for Immunology and Immune Health at the University of Pennsylvania, and also the director of the Colton Consortium for Autoimmunity, Dr. E. John Wherry, PhD, this project goes on to demonstrate the power of collaboration between academia as well as industry. They are bringing together the cross-functional experts in order to transform the human immune profiling so as to get that maximum impact, therefore helping with much deeper insights from their immune cells, which could also speed up the development of medical treatments that are accurate.
The collaboration goes on to reflect a shared vision when it comes to unlocking the power of the human immune system so as to make advancements in science and health. It is indeed made possible due to the BD FACSDiscover™ A8 Cell Analyzer, which is the first cell analyzer that features breakthrough spectral as well as real-time cell imaging technologies, and also the new BD Horizon™ Chroma solution pertaining to dried high-parameter panels. The project goes on to support the commitment of both the organizations to go ahead and contribute to the research community by way of collaboration and knowledge sharing.
As per the worldwide president of BD Biosciences, Steve Conly, high-parameter single-cell studies of such kind, once considered infeasible, are increasingly becoming central to better understanding the human immune system. He added that their ecosystem when it comes to industry-leading BD flow cytometers, reagents, software, and single-cell systems
and informatics offer a critical missing puzzle piece, which can also support the major work of organizations such as I3H in order to translate and roll out immunological insights into quantitative and actionable information for the discovery as well as clinical care teams all across the world.
