High-dimensional spectral cytometry panels for whole blood immune phenotyping

The need to understand the mechanisms and pathways of immune responses in pathogenic conditions such as cancer and autoimmunity requires awareness of natural immune variability in healthy subjects. To this end, various systems immunology studies have been established. Among them, the Milieu Intérieur (MI) study was established to define the boundaries of a healthy immune response and identify determinants of immune response variation. MI used immunophenotyping of a 1000 healthy donor cohort by flow cytometry as a principal outcome for immune variance at steady state. For the 10-year longitudinal MI study, we have developed two high-dimensional spectral flow cytometry panels that allow deep characterization of innate and adaptive whole blood immune cells (35 and 34 fluorescent markers, respectively) and standardized the protocol for sample handling, staining, acquisition, and data analysis. This permits the reproducible quantification of over 182 immune cell phenotypes through robust immunophenotyping at a single site. This highly standardized protocol was applied to samples from patients with autoimmune/inflammatory diseases. It is currently used for characterization of the impact of age and environmental factors on peripheral blood immune phenotypes of >400 donors from the initial MI cohort.