In September 2019, the CHRU of Brest and the University of Western Brittany became the first university hospital to obtain the Hyperion imaging mass cytometer. This cutting-edge equipment can better characterise cancer cells by identifying those that initiate tumours and metastases, both in the blood and within tissues, and answer fundamental questions about resistance to anti-cancer treatments.
Hyperion® enables the Brest University Hospital to offer precision and personalised medicine, to provide practitioners with unique therapeutic capabilities and to develop new collaborative clinical trials in France, Europe and internationally. With the expertise and the reputation of their researchers, the UBO and INSERM will contribute to the development of this technology for clinical applications and the fundamental understanding of anti-cancer strategies, including through personalised immunotherapy.
The research allowed by Hyperion has led to the publication a first article in the journal Frontiers in Immunology: "High dimensional imaging mass cytometry panel to decipher the tumor immune microenvironment context of epithelial cancers".
This publication is the outcome of a year-long collaboration with the UMR7275 IPMC (Institute of Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology) of Valbonne. It describes the validation of a panel and a labelling protocol for mass imaging for the identification of 39 markers and the visualisation of several components of the TiME (tumor immune microenvironment) as well as their interactions in squamous cell carcinomas of the head and neck. This achievement will be followed by a second publication that will investigate the analysis of a tumour surroundings using unsupervised data analysis.
Elaldi R, Hemon P, Petti L, Cosson E, Desrues B, Sudaka A, Poissonnet G, Van Obberghen-Schilling E, Pers J-O, Braud VM, Anjuère F and Meghraoui-Kheddar A (2021) High Dimensional Imaging Mass Cytometry Panel to Visualize the Tumor Immune Microenvironment Contexture. Front. Immunol. 12:666233. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2021.666233