A comprehensive immune monitoring strategy for multicenter clinical trials to achieve high-quality immunophenotyping of individuals from remote communities in Australia 3510

Abstract Description Insight into disease detection and treatment through comprehensive immune phenotyping relies on the generation of high-quality data. However, the execution of robust immune monitoring clinical trials is complex, largely due to logistical challenges and reagent stability. The challenge of high-quality immune monitoring are exacerbated when considering remote and rural communities in Australia, which are burdened by both an increased prevalence and worse prognosis of cancer. However, remote and rural Australians are underrepresented in clinical trials. Advances in highly multiparametric CyTOF™ technology now allow us to expand clinical implementation of our novel blood “immune signature” therapy response studies, compatible with current hospital laboratories, to remote settings. Blood samples are stained with lyophilized reagents, cryopreserved and shipped to a central site to finalize preparation to uniquely enable 50-plus-marker comprehensive data from a single sample. Here we present findings from a 100-sample pilot study of this workflow performed at five sites across Australia. A combination of manual gating and automated high-dimensional clustering was performed in CellEngine, with principal component analysis of all samples demonstrating harmony across the sites. Overall, this workflow enables access to underserved communities, facilitating for the first time equity and scalability of immune phenotyping studies to harness truly geographically dispersed clinical centers. Funding Sources Supported by NHMRC Development Grant Topic Categories Tumor Immunology: Cellular Responses and Tumor Microevironment (TIME)