HIMC - Human Immune Monitoring Center
The HEDCO Human Immune Monitoring Core
Support for the HIMC
The Institute of Immunity, Transplantation and Infection (ITI) proudly acknowledges the support of : The HEDCO Foundation, The Russell Foundation, The Sidney E. Frank Foundation, Becton, Dickinson and Co, and the Office of the Dean. The creation of the HIMC was made possible by their generous contributions.
To help further support this bold endeavor, please contact June Lang, Senior Director of Development, Stanford University Medical Center: Email jplange at stanford dot edu [jplang] or tel: (650) 234-0674
The Human Immune Monitoring Center (HIMC), led by Holden Maecker, Director, is a new facility that was jointly developed by the Institute of Immunology, Transplantation and Infection (ITI) and the Center of Clinical Immunology at Stanford (CCIS). The laboratory is charged with developing and implementing assays (for protocols click here) that will monitor the health of the human immune system and to make these assays available to the Stanford Medical research community and others, as resources permit.
The goal of the HIMC is to provide scientific and innovative approaches to clinical physicians who are providers of basic patient care and engaged in clinical trials. We will provide additional testing using advanced assays designed to measure immune function. This center will serve as a proving ground where clinicians, basic researchers and technologists can come together to innovate and translate basic research into clinical practice. We do this through collaborations with medical researchers at Stanford and leading biotechnology and pharmaceutical company researchers. We will communicate our progress through scientific presentations, publications and training. Our goal is to create a center where assays developed to make progress in one disease area will rapidly be adopted to work in other areas.
Virtually everyone recognizes that the immune system is important to our health. And yet currently there are almost no recognized clinical assays to measure immune function. Our center can provide “one-stop-shopping” for a wide range of immunological tests for clinical trials in any disease of immunological etiology. There are a number of tests that are currently done in research labs to measure immune function or to measure an immune response to disease. Examples include measurement of serum cytokines, or induction of cytokine secretion by immune cells; measurement of phosphorylation events within immune cells; and proliferation capacity of immune cells. All these tests can be done with just a few milliliters of blood and the results, when combined with antibody or nucleic acid measurements can be extremely useful in monitoring diseases or the response to immunological intervention. Our assays will aid in the discovery of biomarkers that could give information about early disease detecion, progression, suitability for a specific therapy, or response to treatment.
Our specific objectives include:
- Adapt and provide a number of cutting edge biomarker assays that can be done on small amounts of patient blood. This includes phenotypic and functional assays on nucleic acids, proteins and viable cells that are collected with standardized protocols. These immune monitoring assays will become increasingly necessary to obtain funding and approval for clinical research trials.
- Leverage the HIMC’s highly trained staff to assist in experimental design, collection, preparation, archiving, assay and analysis of samples.
- Communicate with clinicians as to what assays are currently available in the research lab and adapt them to human use. Make it easier for clinicians to be involved in asking research related questions and generating the type of immune assays that could make clinical research experiments more valuable.
- Innovate with equipment, reagent, and software companies to develop new products that will improve our assays.
- Educate through continued training, seminars, publications, community outreach and other programs demonstrating immune assay utility.
- Create equipment interfaces that are designed to work together, speed throughput and minimize assay error.
- Create awareness of our activities through interactions with collaborators, the medical community and the general public.
- Integrate areas of medicine through information provided by the immune system.
Overview of Assays
The HIMC will provide a series of Immune assays on blood samples collected as part of clinical research at Stanford. For detailed protocols, please click here.
Samples will be collected and processed for plasma and cell proteins, nucleic acids and viable cells for numerous assays that will measure immune system response or function.
- Serum cytokine profiles
- Leukocyte functional responses, including cytokines and phosphoproteins
- Leukocytes phenotyping, including memory and effector markers
- RNA expression profiling (done in collaboration with Stanford's Functional Genomics Center)
The technologies are continually improving but current bead-based and array technologies combined with flow cytometry are currently being used.
For more information contact:
Holden T. Maecker, PhD
Director, Human Immune Monitoring Center
Email maecker at stanford dot edu [maecker]
phone: .650.723.1671
Stanford School of Medicine
CCSR Building 0125A
ITI Internal