Local immune responses in COVID-19 neuropathology analyzed using IMC 

A team led by Bertram Bengsch, MD, PhD, Group Leader at the University Medical Center Freiburg, has been investigating the underlying pathophysiological mechanisms in severe neurological symptoms associated with COVID-19. Learn more about their investigations in Bengsch’s keynote address at the October 21, 2021 IMC Summit: Uncovering Spatial Biology, or in his group’s recent publication “Deep spatial profiling of human COVID-19 brains reveals neuroinflammation with distinct microanatomical microglia-T-cell interactions”.   

• Watch keynote presentation

Improved understanding of lung pathology and immune response to COVID-19

Interview | Olivier Elemento, PhD

Olivier Elemento, PhD
Professor, Physiology and Biophysics, Weill Cornell Medicine
Director, Englander Institute for Precision Medicine

Oliver Elemento shares his expert insight on the transformation of precision medicine. In this short video, Elemento describes why artificial intelligence, high-throughput sequencing and Imaging Mass Cytometry are becoming increasingly critical tools for personalizing treatments and improving patient outcomes.

Olivier Elemento, PhD, of Weill Cornell Medicine was lead researcher and co-senior author of a study published in Nature, “The spatial landscape of lung pathology during COVID-19 progression.” Learn how his team used a rich IMC dataset to investigate the composition and spatial architecture of human acute lung injury including SARS-CoV-2 at single-cell resolution. By interpreting changes in tissue architecture, the researchers gained insights into the mechanisms of disease progression in COVID-19 patients.  

• Watch the July 2021 Nature Portfolio webcast 

You can also hear the first author, Andre Rendeiro, PhD, present highlights of this work in a short presentation from the October 21, 2021, IMC Summit: Uncovering Spatial Biology.  

• Watch the IMC Summit presentation 

Researchers using IHC can benefit from the high-dimensional spatial visualization that IMC offers 

An early COVID-19 publication showing the histopathology of lung tissue from a critically ill patient was submitted by Luo et al. In “Clinical pathology of critical patient with novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19)” (Preprints, 2020), the authors describe their research to understand the pathogenesis and severity of the disease. 

This team utilized immunohistochemistry (IHC) to positively identify several markers in immune infiltrates in a lung biopsy sample. The results suggested the general spatial context of the cells present focally in lung interstitium and near blood vessels. 

A short summary of the publication results is included in the Standard BioTools™ article Imaging Mass Cytometry Publication Review. After the summary, commentary from Standard BioTools introduces how researchers using IHC could benefit from using the Hyperion Imaging System to characterize lung tissue from COVID-19 or other diseases. Certainly, IHC results demonstrate how this approach can be used to spatially assess immune infiltration. However, by leveraging IMC, deeper insights from profiling many markers in a single scan could be achieved while minimizing the use of precious disease tissue samples. The article includes an example of lung tissue visualized using IMC to look at multiple markers in the same scan. 

• Read the article