Measuring natural killer cell cytotoxicity by flow cytometry.

Pathology

Division of Clinical Immunology, Department of Pathology, Queen Mary Hospital, Hong Kong.

Published: April 2019

AI Article Synopsis

  • NK cells play a vital role in defending against viral infections and cancerous cells, making their cytotoxic activity important for immune response.
  • The traditional Chromium (Cr)-release assay, while considered the gold standard for measuring NK cell activity, has issues like using radioactive materials and inconsistent results across different labs.
  • A new flow cytometry (FC) method was developed and validated with samples from healthy individuals and patients to assess NK cell function, showing it to be a reliable alternative to the Cr-release assay for clinical use.

Article Abstract

Natural killer (NK) cell cytotoxic function is critical in guarding an organism against viral infections and malignantly transformed cells. Although the Chromium (Cr)-release assay is regarded as the gold standard for assessing NK cell cytolytic activity, this method is associated with a number of technical problems including the use of radioactive reagents and inconsistent assay performance, due to the lack of assay standardisation across laboratories. Here we describe the setup of a flow cytometry (FC) based method for the measurement of NK cell cytotoxicity, suitable for patient testing. The FC protocol was assessed using four normal samples, and reference values for NK activity of the local Hong Kong population were defined by 40 peripheral blood samples from healthy volunteers. For method validation, we tested a total of 13 specimens including nine healthy individuals and four patients with clinical conditions that were expected to have NK cell dysfunction. We directly compared those results between FC and the Cr-release assay and we were able to demonstrate that FC is a clinically valid method for measuring NK cell function in a clinical setting.

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Source
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pathol.2018.12.417DOI Listing

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