Applying Artificial Intelligence And Bioinformatics To Create Complete Picture Of Immune System

Nowadays, the brightest innovations usually happen at the intersection of different disciplines and technologies. A recent scientific achievement by Dr. Carsten Krieg, a researcher at Hollings Cancer Center (HCC), Medical University of South Carolina, is not an exception to this observation.
With an ambitious goal in mind to advance the field of cancer immunotherapy, Dr. Krieg combines a very powerful analytical technique -- mass cytometry, with artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and bioinformatics tools to visualize the obtained experimental data and have a bird’s-eye view of the immune system.

Mass cytometry, or CyTOF (cytometry by time-of-flight), is a variation of flow cytometry in which antibodies are labeled with heavy metal ions (in the case of Dr. Krieg’s experiments -- with rare metals), rather than fluorochromes, and then time-of-flight mass spectrometry is used for readout.

Basically, Dr. Krieg used this approach to stain cells using rare metal-conjugated antibodies that target surface and intracellular proteins to visualize what was happening on a cellular level. After staining, the cells are ionized using an inductively-coupled plasma. The ions derived from each stained cell are then detected in a mass spectrometer.

According to Dr. Krieg, this technique can potentially identify up to 100 markers per cell, but practically speaking, results on around 40 markers are more realistic to achieve.