Techniques

UV-induced peptide exchange

Sanquin Immunomonitoring Services offers a fast, reliable method to find the right peptides for HLA class I molecules, which is essential for identifying new T cell epitopes.

With UV-induced peptide exchange you can test 80 peptides at once. This method speeds up the discovery of peptides of interest that may bind to MHC class I and are potentially immunogenic.

Combinatorial coding

We offer a high-throughput screening of your patient samples to detect antigen specific T cells in vaccination studies or cell therapy.

Limitations current techniques

The detection of antigen-specific CD8⁺ T cells recognizing an HLA binding peptide is possible by staining these cells with fluorescently labelled multimers. To date, a limited number of antigen-specific T cell populations per sample can be detected.

This limits the ability to perform a comprehensive analysis of disease-associated or therapy-induced T cell responses. In particular for clinical samples this can be a considerable disadvantage.

Advantage of combinatorial coding

Combinatorial coding is a new high-tech method to circumvent the limitation of sample size. With this technique monitoring of T cell recognition of the MHC-peptide complexes can be performed quickly in small sample volumes.

Minimum use of patient sample

28 different MHC/peptide combinations can be analysed simultaneously in one blood sample. Instead of using 200ml of blood, only 8ml of blood is needed to broadly screen for immunogenic peptides.

The combinatorial coding can be used for:

• screening of the immunogenicity of your peptides of interest
• detecting antigen specific T cells during clinical interventions, such as vaccination studies or cell therapy