The mission of the HDI program is to conduct rigorous, highly detailed analysis of precious clinical and biological samples to promote our understanding of the immune system and advance the development of effective immune-based therapies.
- Application of a suite of sequencing, cytometry, and imaging techniques to comprehensively interrogate biological samples
- Combine mechanistic studies with multi-omic correlative analyses for pre-clinical and clinical research
- Create and refine research tools for experimental and statistical analyses
- Diagnostics - Development of new immune-based diagnostics and tools to inform clinical decision making
- Therapies – Multi-modal high-parameter investigation to guide discovery and development of new therapeutics for cancer, infectious diseases, degenerative diseases, and organ transplant
- Training – Creating opportunities for the next generation of researchers to acquire the necessary knowledge, skills and experience through mentorship and collaborations
The VIC HDI team has developed computational strategies and algorithms for analyzing high-dimensional data to identify specific immune system responses associated with clinical measures and outcomes. The program utilizes multiple high-parameter technologies, applying them singly or in combination as appropriate for a specific project to maximize the amount of information obtained from small clinical samples of blood or tissue, such as
- High-parameter profiling of through spectral flow cytometry and mass cytometry
- Multi-modal imaging of cells, biomolecules, and drugs in pathology samples
Outputs from these assays, together with classical immunoassays and clinical data can be interrogated using a robust repertoire of computational and statistical tools to gain novel insights and identify actionable hallmarks.
The HDI program is open to collaboration with academic and industry researchers from outside of VIC and MGH.
- Vaccines for infectious disease and cancer
- Profiling of tumor immune microenvironment
- Immune monitoring following organ transplant, cancer therapy, or traumatic injury
- Characterization of immune dysfunction in degenerative diseases.
