Imaging the unimaginable with (imaging) mass cytometry | Frits Koning

Hear Frits Koning, PhD, describe how his team from Leiden University used Imaging Mass Cytometry™ (IMC™) to assess the spatial information in intestinal specimens to unveil the interactions between normal and disease-related cell types.

In this recorded webinar, Koning discusses:
- how IMC was used to expand on cell suspension data from distinct immune and intestinal disease-associated subsets that distinguished patients from controls
- strategies for validation of multiplexing panels to interrogate diverse tumor and immune cell populations
- the development of Hierarchical Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (HSNE) to handle large data files for accurate reconstruction of the tissue organization based on multiparameter IMC data
- early evidence for the existence of innate lymphoid cell clusters that are in close contact with T cell and myeloid cell clusters

Researchers in Koning’s lab are investigating how the immune system functions, especially in gastrointestinal disorders. They concurrently assess adaptive and innate immune subsets and aim to identify which are correlated with disease. By combining IMC with HSNE-based computational approaches, they can perform high-content analysis of intact tissues at the single-cell level. They anticipate that such an approach may shed light on cellular aberrations linked to intestinal diseases. Koning is an internationally recognized expert in celiac disease, and his group was the first to identify a gluten peptide that was recognized by gluten-specific T-cells isolated from the small intestine of a celiac disease patient. Koning also heads up the mass spectrometry unit and serves as the Chief Executive Officer of the Dutch-based Celiac Disease Consortium.

About the Speaker:
Frits Koning, PhD
Professor
Department of Immunohematology and Blood Transfusion
Leiden University Medical Center

From the 2018 Imaging Mass Cytometry User Group Meeting.