A Gambro BCT Elutra Cell Separation System is available to us. We have experience, e.g., in using it for monocyte enrichment.

We have knowhow on ELISPOT analysis of long peptide vaccines.

Our lab has expertise about ELISPOT analyses from the long peptide trial in end stage cervical carnoma, resected cervical carcinoma and VIN III patients.

An Elispot assay was applied in the establishment of immunomonitoring vaccination trials with RNA transfected DC by using overlapping peptides.

We have experience about using Elispot assays for monitoring vaccine induced specific anti-tumor T cell responses.

Our lab has expertise in performing ELISA assays. For example, we have monitored vaccine induced T cell responses for two clinical trials. We found CD8+ and CD4+ T cell responses against the immunological tracers KLH and TK, and against the NTPs and MAGE-3, respectively.

We have experience with ELISA assay for IL-17 from e-Bioscience.

We have experience with ELISA for IL-12p70 from R&D System.

An ELISA assay using the kit from Biosource was performed according to the manufacturer’s instructions for the measurement of different cytokines.

Our lab has expertise with Elispot assays. We evaluated the capacity of autologous DC and HEK293 cells transfected with relevant HLA alleles to function as T cell targets in Elispot assays upon transfection with tumor antigen encoding plasmids.

We have expertise in performing ELISA assays. For instance, we use the ELISA kit for IL-12 and IL-10 from Biosource to evaluate cytokine accumulation in supernatants at 24h, according to a standard protocol and it was measured at 450n

We have experience with the exponentially modified Protein Abundance Index (emPAI) method, a label free spectral counting procedure for determining relative protein amounts of LC-MS/MS data. A comprehensive protein inventory of clinical grade immature and cytokine cocktail matured (Il-6, IL-1 beta, TNF alpha, PGE2; 48 hours) monocyte derived human dendritic cells (DC) from a healthy donor has been established by using high accuracy, high sensitivity protein identification technology. The criteria applied resulted in a list of 2794 unique proteins that were identifie...

These bioassays were designed taking advantage of some results obtained by performing global gene expression analyses. We have optimised a DC-based assay aimed at identifying new adjuvant molecules potentially capable to induce Th1 responses. This bioassay is a list of standardized procedures, which enables to use the dendritic cells as tools for the determination of the effects of new chemical compounds on dendritic cell capacity to produce type I IFNs.

We have used the electron microscope that is available to our lab, e.g., to document the production and secretion of tubulovesicular structures by cells overexpressing VSV-G glycoprotein and for documentation of production and secretion of tubulovesicular structures.

The experiments on human monocyte-derived DC are being annotated in DC-BASE, a unique DC-dedicated database integrated with data mining tools. The database uses a LIMS system based on the structure of Base2.9. The database currently contains 240 microarray experiments annotated accordingly to MIAME standards and thoroughly analyzed in order to pass severe quality control tests. A meeting will be organized for defining policies on data sharing within the DC-THERA community and beyond. In order to populate DC-BASE with data obtained from the literature, we used the ...

This bioassay is a list of standardized procedures, which enables to use the dendritic cells as tools for the determination of the effects of new chemical compounds on dendritic cell capacity to produce type I IFNs. The selected molecules could be potential new vaccine adjuvants.

In the DC-THERA effort to create new dendritic cell-based therapies, a wide range of information arising from genomics, proteomics, molecular cell biology and pre-clinical models is gathered and applied to the conduction of clinical trials. The DC-THERA Directory is intended to collect and semantically organize this data and to serve as a tool for collaboration among researchers and as a reference point for the information contained. As such it is a directory that provides summarized information and relations between resources and people involved. In particular, we ...

DC-PathEdit is a software based on PathVisio (http://www.pathvisio.org) created for the graphical representation of the pathways and for the establishment of annotations and other properties. It is used as an intermediate step towards the creation of a complete data model of the DC-ATLAS pathways, as it can represent them graphically and also annotate them using a controlled vocabulary.

DC-STUDIO is a bioinformatics environment enabling the interrogation of DC genomics experiments according to a pathway-based logic. It is integrated with DC-BASE.

We have been developing the DC-ATLAS DC-pathway database. For this, we have set about identifying key signalling pathways that were likely to be of most relevance to dendritic cell functions. We have designed a DC-ATLAS data model to effectively describe pathways, their genes, and their interaction. We produced a controlled vocabulary that contains at least 400 ontological terms, prepared on the basis of the proposals and discussions among the researchers involved in DC-ATLAS project. We defined the pathway representation where each pathway was described using three ...