Advantages of Targeted Digital Cytometry for Cell Type Composition Profiling
Current methods for determining cell type composition have limitations including throughput, cost, and artifacts introduced by tissue dissociation. Thus, deconvolution algorithms for determining cell type composition from bulk tissue expression profiles have gained traction.
CiberMed’s iSort™ is a digital cytometry solution based on CIBERSORTx with novel enhancements. Pairing iSort with Agilent SureSelect targeted sequencing enables a new approach for “targeted digital cytometry,” which achieves highly accurate and reproducible enumeration of cell subsets in blood and solid tissue samples, while reducing the sequencing requirement over whole transcriptome profiling by up to 50-fold.
This webinar will present two NGS target enrichment panels optimized for determining cell type composition from both blood and tissue samples, discuss the gene signature matrices used to inform these panels, show data demonstrating the above performance gains, and conclude with application-specific use cases where determining cell type composition by deconvolution has demonstrated advantages over more traditional methods such as flow cytometry or single cell RNA sequencing.
Key learning objectives
- Understand how targeted digital cytometry addresses limitations of traditional methods for determining cell type composition
- Learn how novel enhancements in CiberMed’s iSort™ software, paired with Agilent SureSelect targeted sequencing panels, improve the accuracy and reproducibility of cell subset enumeration
- Explore the scalability and performance gains of targeted digital cytometry
Who should attend?
- Immunology, oncology, molecular biology researchers – interested in advanced methods for cell type composition analysis
- Bioinformaticians - implementing deconvolution algorithms
- Clinical lab professionals – seeking methods to improve cell profiling within FFPE samples
- Pharma and biotech industry professionals – applying cell profiling to biomarker discovery and drug development
- Academics – interested in advancements and applications for targeted digital cytometry
Certificate of attendance
All webinar participants can request a certificate of attendance, including a learning outcomes summary, for continuing education purposes.
Speakers
Kristi Stephenson is an Associate Director of Product Marketing at Agilent’s Diagnostics and Genomics Division. With a background in clinical laboratory testing and expertise in next-generation sequencing techniques, she has spent the last nine years in various customer-focused roles. These include technical sales specialist, technology assessment, strategic partnership-focused market development, and portfolio strategy and positioning.
Aaron is a co-founder of CiberMed, an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Data Science at Stanford, and a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator. His research program focuses on developing innovative data science tools to study the phenotypic diversity, differentiation hierarchies, and clinical significance of tumor cells and their surrounding microenvironments. As part of this effort, Aaron has made significant contributions to computational biology, including CIBERSORT/x, which is widely used to determine cellular composition from bulk tissue genomic profiles; EcoTyper to decipher cell states and multicellular ecosystems at massive scale; CytoTRACE for inferring differentiation states from single-cell expression data; and CytoSPACE for enhancing the spatial resolution and gene coverage of spatial transcriptomics data. These tools have enabled researchers to uncover hidden patterns and relationships within biological data, ultimately leading to a deeper understanding of complex tissue systems, including human malignancies.
Moderator
