Towards standardization of immune functional assays

Abstract

Recent advances in the immunotherapy field require evaluation of the immune function to adapt therapeutic decisions. Immune functional assays (IFA) are able to reveal the immune status and would be useful to further adapt/improve patients care. However, standardized methods are needed to implement IFA in clinical settings. We carried out an independent validation of a published method used to characterize the underlying host response to infectious conditions using an IFA. We evaluate the reproducibility and robustness of this IFA and associated readout using an independent healthy volunteers (HV) cohort. Expression of a 44 genes-signatures and IFN{gamma} protein secretion and gene-expression was assessed after stimulation. We observed a strong host-response correlation between the two cohorts. We also highlight that standardized methods for immune function evaluation exist and could be implemented in larger-scale studies. This IFA could be a relevant tool to reveal innate/adaptive immune dysfunction in immune-related disorders patients.