Validated assays to measure autoantigen-specific T-cell frequency and phenotypes are needed to enable assessment of risk, disease monitoring, evaluating treatment responses, and personalizing therapy. The BRI Tetramer Core has developed reliable and reproducible methods for staining and enumerating multiple epitope specificities in a single staining tube. We assisted with a multicenter study (coordinated through the James Laboratory) through which a multicolor HLA tetramer panel that included a reference influenza epitope and multiple islet epitopes was validated. The results of the study demonstrated that the tetramer assay is reproducible and useful to characterize islet-specific T cells and identify correlations between T-cell measures and clinical traits.
Technical validation of HLA tetramer-based assays
