Tonight’s meeting began with Carina Torres introducing a few members to allow everyone to get to know each other. Announcements included job postings for Miltenyi as well as CEUs being offered by FloCyte for these meetings. FloCyte will also be offering more regular flow cytometry classes and wanted to get a better idea of what type of classes the community was interested in. A survey will be sent out soon.
The first speaker for the day was from one of the sponsors, Miltenyi Biotec. Matthew Drew talked about how Miltenyi has changed over the years, starting in Stefan Miltenyi’s mother’s basement. They have grown from a sample prep company to offering over 600 flow cytometry antibodies, flow cytometers, and sorters. They offer complete work flows for scientists to provide all of their reagent needs.
The next talk was from the 2nd sponsor, DeNovo Software. Kaya Ghosh is a scientist based in San Diego helping scientists learn how to use FCS Express software. She went over the new capabilities version 5 offers.
The main speaker was Chris Groves from MedImmune, an AstraZeneca company. They are creating a company-wide flow cytometry platform to allow their scientists to plan and analyze their flow cytometry experiments more accurately. They provide what they call a global core which is a unified website that gives everyone access to protocols and assay planning features, among many others. They have been working with Miltenyi to develop standard flow cytometry panels giving scientists access to easier ways to run their research. They have created video tutorials, automated immunophenotyping methods, and multiassay toolkits. Their goal is to help move research forward faster by giving everyone the same tools to run their assays. If everyone uses the same platforms and assays, it is easier to standardize their work. He showed some research done on a CAR-T agonist for cancer treatment. They used a CT26 tumor model to study cells infiltrating the tumors. Monitoring exhaustion markers, such as TIM3 and PD1 helped them monitor their drug treatments. They plan to develop more tools for their scientists to do cutting edge research, such as using the MACSPlex miRNA beads from Miltenyi to study changes in tumors in response to treatments. They are moving towards standardizing assays for their scientists to give them better tools to do better research.
Cheryl Kim ended the talk by announcing that the next SDSC meeting will be Dec. 3, 2015.