Abstract
Immune monitoring of circulating immune cells in the blood provides insight into a patient’s own immune response over the course of a treatment or disease progression. Information such as whether immune cells are functional or non-functional and what specific proteins they express or secrete can be essential to understand if (and how) a treatment is working or a disease is progressing. To do so, it requires careful handling and storage of precious biological samples with the goals of obtaining a large amount of information from limited samples and minimizing future research costs by the use of banked samples. Many factors, including blood sample types, time of collection, containers used, preservatives and other additives, transport means, and length of transit time, all affect the quality of the samples and the stability of biomarkers and must be considered at the initial collection stage. An efficient study design includes provisions for further processing of the original samples, such as cryopreservation of isolated cells, purification of DNA and RNA, and preparation of specimens for genomic, immunological, and biochemical analyses. Development of standard operating procedures and quality control plans is a safeguard of the samples’ quality and of the validity of the results. Here, we focus on the collection and processing of blood suitable for plasma and peripheral blood mononuclear cell (PBMC) banking, including collection, processing, and storage of samples, based on our experience.
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Acknowledgments
This protocol was prepared at the immune-monitoring platform of the CRCHUM. This work was supported by the Montréal Cancer Consortium (MCC) of the Marathon of Hope (MoH) from the Terry Fox Research Institute (TFRI). Support was also from the Cancer Network (supported by the Fonds de Recherche en Santé du Québec [FRQS] and the Québec Breast Cancer Foundation [QBCF]) and from a Challenge grant of the Canadian Cancer Society Research Institute (CCSRI).
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Thébault, P., Cailhier, JF., Lapointe, R. (2023). Blood Sample Processing and Banking for Functional and Molecular Analyses. In: Ursini-Siegel, J. (eds) The Tumor Microenvironment. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 2614. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-2914-7_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-2914-7_3
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