What We Do with your biospecimens

Valuable blood and tissue biopsies will be tested for their immune composition, immune cell gene expression, and immune interaction biology. All of our efforts from clinic to laboratory are compliant with the Federal HIPAA Privacy Rule to protect your medical records and personal health information.

Our team will use blood and tissue biopsies taken from patients to intensively analyze their immune composition and divide the immune response into subclasses that define the disease. As shown in the figure below, we aim to make maximal use of donated tissue. When a tissue is removed, we immediately bring it to the laboratory. By taking it live and intact, we have the opportunity to study it much more intensely. Tissue cells and immune cells continue to interact in these sections for many hours and we use technology developed at UCSF to study this using multiple kinds of tests, such as quantifying immune cells at the edge or center of the tissue and subjecting them to live imaging in order to view how the cells behave.

Segments of the tissue biopsies are also carefully dissociated into single cells and subjected to state-of-the-art technology to quantify them. This is analogous to figuring out how many soldiers are present on the battlefield, where they are positioned, and how they are acting. As a final step, we will determine which molecules are being expressed in the key subsets of cells. The molecular contents of a cell tells you what that cell can and cannot do to assist in clearing the disease. Going back to the army analogy, it is like determining what functions each cell can perform. This latter point is quite important since we need to activate some cells, while inhibiting others.

At the end of each Consortium project, we will have accrued all the data that defines the disease as a collection of immunoprofiles. From this, we will understand new ways to best diagnose and treat people in a personalized manner.