A step towards personalised medicine

Scientists have published a paper in The Journal of Immunology that explains how they have used high dimensional mass cytometry to view the immune cell landscape of bowel cancer tumours to understand more about the types of cells present and how they might be beneficial for the patient. Results of their study have identified that the tumour is infiltrated by an enormous variety of types of immune cells, concluding that any one, or combination of many immune cells, could have an effect on patient outcomes. This could mean personalised and individualised medicine and treatment for many diseases in the future.
Lead researcher Associate Professor Roslyn Kemp said: “It can be thought of as taking a higher resolution ‘photo’ of the inside of the tumour. The photo may reveal new types of cells that may or may not be targetable by drugs, or reveal the different composition of immune cell populations in individuals that could be used to predict the course of the disease. The technique could be used to study a number of different diseases. It demonstrates the use of a new technology to study the immune response in much more detail than other methods currently used, providing new types of information for patients. It is a step towards personalised medicine, sometimes referred to as precision medicine, since each patient’s tumour could be looked at with this amount of detail.”