Lymph nodes

Dr Astero Klampatsa (PhD) is a Team Leader in Cancer Immunotherapy at the Institute of Cancer Research, London, UK and a Senior Lecturer in King’s College London, UK. She focuses on developing novel CAR T cell therapies for mesothelioma and lung cancer, as well as the immunobiology of these malignancies for identification of markers of response to immunotherapy. In this webinar, Dr. Klampatsa will discuss how the Compresstome® was used to create precision-cut tumor slices (PCTS) as an ex vivo model for immunotherapy research.

Fresh tissue can vary wildly in its level of difficulty to cut, due to a variety of factors like tissue type, and maturity of the animal (myelination). Often with other vibrating microtomes, they struggle to handle highly myelinated tissue or very soft neonatal tissue. The compression effect, along with multiple points of adjustment (speed, oscillation, and agarose concentration) enables our instrument to better handle “difficult” to cut tissue. The Compresstome® isn’t just able to cut thinner than the competition, we believe that the evidence shows that we also provide higher quality cuts that preserve cell surface structures and help increase the number of healthy to dead cells. Researchers at University of Minnesota use a Compresstome^® to section live tissue in their procedure to locate, quantify, and phenotype antigen-specific CD8 T cells.

Dr. Tsilingiri is working on tumor immunotherapy and using the Compresstome vibrating microtome to examine the interaction between tumor tissues and autologous lymph node cells in slice cultures. This work is being carried out in the frame of an EU-funded Consortium, Tumour-LNoC (Tumour-Lymph node on a chip), with the ultimate goal of mimicking the metastatic process on a chip and monitor metastasizing cells in real time.