1:00pm Tuesday 9 July
Room 208, 2nd floor
Microbiology building
720 Cumberland Street
Dr Felix Marsh-Wakefield
University of Sydney
Investigating B cells in multiple sclerosis using mass cytometry
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disease of the central nervous system. In recent years, B cells have been found to play a more prominent role in the context of MS. Multiple therapeutics decrease the level of circulating B cells, in particular CD27+ memory B cells, suggesting these may be detrimental in the disease pathogenesis.
We used mass cytometry to increase the number of B cell subsets we could identify. B cells from the blood of inactive and active MS patients were compared. Bioinformatics was utilised to assist in the analyses. The clustering algorithm FlowSOM and dimensionality reduction algorithm tSNE were used. Many changes were observed, most notably an increase in switched memory B cells with a decrease in naïve B cells in active MS compared to inactive MS patients. These analyses provide further insight into the role of B cells in the progression of MS, and may help guide the development of more targeted therapeutics.
