Oncology & Immuno-oncology

Nanolive technology allows to visualize the changes in cell morphology and behaviour that occur during interactions between immune cells and cancer cells at all stages of the disease process, from invasion, migration and metastasis, to cell death. Quantitative analyses of cell proliferation across time can also be performed enabling researchers to compare how cancer cells respond to different antibodies or immune checkpoint inhibitors.

New digital assay: The LIVE T Cell Assay is the first multi-parametric, label-free live immuno-oncology assay that is able to measure and characterize in one experiment how T cells find, bind, stress, kill and serial kill their targets and to select the best T cell therapy on living cells.

Cytotoxic T-cells are powerful effector cells capable of killing target cells bearing an appropriate antigenic complex (peptide–MHC), which is recognized by their T-cell receptor (TCR). Most T-cells are however unable to recognize and kill tumor cells, because of the lack of tumor-specificity of their TCR. By using bispecific antibodies targeting tumor-associated antigens (TAA) on the cancer cells and the CD3 protein complexes on T-cells, it is possible to redirect and activate any circulating T-cells against tumor cells independently of the specificity of their TCR.

In this video, we follow this process, using the 5×5 grid scan mode on Nanolive’s automated microscope, the CX-A. Image were acquired ever 4 min 30 s, for 20 h.

Read our detailed blogpost here.

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Cyclin-dependent kinase 2 (Cdk2) drives the progression of cells into the S- and M-phases of the cell cycle. The upregulation of Cdk2 activity plays a critical role in the growth of tumors in multiple cancers, and so the development of selective Cdk2 inhibitors hold promise for anticancer drug development.

In this video, we compare the dry mass changes that pre-adipocyte (green) and glioblastoma cells (orange) undergo in response to Cdk2 inhibition. Cells were imaged using the 5×5 gridscan mode (450×450 µm) on the CX-A, at an acquisition rate of 1 image every 2 secs for 20 h.

Both cell types lost dry mass following Cdk2 inhibition and as expected, cell death occurred during mitosis.

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Receptor tyrosine kinases (RTKs) are key regulatory signaling proteins involved in cancer cell growth and metastasis, and so, they are attractive therapeutic targets for the treatment of cancer. In this video, we expose pre-adipocyte (green) and glioblastoma cells (orange) to an RTK-inhibitor and imaged their response. One image was acquired every 113 secs using the 5×5 gridscan mode on Nanolive’s CX-A.

RTK-inhibition initiated different mechanisms of cell death in the two cell types. Pre-adipocyte cell death occurred predominantly by apoptosis, whereas glioblastoma cell death occurred primarily by necroptosis. Understanding the type of cell death that a drug causes is important as it can affect the progression of diseases or the side-effects of a drug: apoptosis is immunologically silent meaning it does not promote a significant auto-immune response, whereas necroptosis induces significant inflammation.

Read the full blogpost here.

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Chromatin stability play a key role in degenerative processes such as aging and cancer. This video, taken by Dr. Caroline Mauvezin, a Research Associate based at Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute – IDIBELL in Barcelona (Spain) illustrates how Nanolive imaging can be used in conjunction with fluorescence (here green localizes Histone 2B-GFP a chromosome marker, and red, LAMP1-RFP a lysosome marker), to investigate such phenomena. Refractive index images were taken every 2 mins, and fluorescent images were captured once every 20 mins, for 5 h.

For more inspirational videos from researchers based in Spain and Portugal, check out our dedicated blogpost here.

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Staurosporine-induced cell death in HeLa cells

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