Investigators have developed a new mathematical approach to analyze molecular data derived from complex mixtures of immune cells. This approach, when combined with well-established techniques, readily identifies changes in small samples of human whole blood, and has the potential to distinguish between health and disease states. read more

"Defining the status of the human immune system in health and disease is a major goal of human immunology research," says NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. "A method allowing clinicians to accurately and quickly characterize the many different immune cells in human blood would be a valuable research and diagnostic tool.
"Current methods that examine gene expression differences in mixtures of immune cells in blood do not take into account that, even among healthy individuals, there is a wide range of variation in the proportion of each cell type," says Dr. Davis.
"What csSAM does is marry the concepts of cell separation with the ease of analyzing large families of genes on a microarray," explains Dr. Butte. "Using a mathematical approach, we can virtually separate out the different cell types found in blood, determine the gene expression patterns of these cell types, and identify which changes in gene expression are due to actual disease and which are simply due to variations in the cell proportions."