What the Costco hotdog can teach us about the immune state

If you’re developing a drug that acts on the immune system, one of the surprisingly hard problems is figuring out exactly what part of the immune system your drug hits.As a result, scientists have developed a technique called “immune profiling” to figure out what cells of the immune system a drug is reaching. Flow cytometry is the most widely used version of immune profiling. Flow cytometry allows you to look at 6-8 protein markers on cells simultaneously, which is helpful for identifying a single type of immune cell, like T cells for example.The problem is, by focusing just on T cells (or a small subset), you can miss many important cell types, like Myeloid cells and B cells, that your drug might be affecting.In this video, we'll describe the surprising link between flow cytometry, mass cytometry and the Costco hot dog.