DATE: March 21, 2018
TIME: 8:00AM PST, 11:00AM EST

Mass cytometry, or cytometry by time-of-flight (the basis of the CyTOF® system), enables quantification of the abundance and functional responses of billions of cells from all major immune subsets simultaneously. In this webinar, Brice Gaudilliere and Nima Aghaeepour, both of Stanford University School of Medicine, will present how they characterized the molecular pacemakers of pregnancy by integrating CyTOF analysis and other omic approaches on blood samples collected throughout pregnancy.

The maintenance of pregnancy relies on a finely tuned immune balance between tolerance to the fetal allograft and protective mechanisms against invading pathogens. Demonstrating the chronology of immune adaptations to a term pregnancy provides the framework for future studies examining deviations implicated in pregnancy-related pathologies including preterm birth and preeclampsia.

Dr. Gaudilliere will present data demonstrating that these adaptations are precisely timed, reflecting an immune clock of pregnancy in women delivering at term. An elastic net model, with prior Bayesian distributions extracted from literature-based knowledge of the immune system, was used to develop a predictive model of interrelated immune events that accurately captured the chronology of pregnancy. Model components not only highlighted known biology, such as enhanced innate immune responses during pregnancy, but revealed novel biology, including a critical role for IL-2–dependent STAT5a/b signaling pathway in modulating T cell function during pregnancy. https://gaudillierelab.stanford.edu/

Dr. Aghaeepour will describe how the immunological dataset derived from the CyTOF analysis was integrated with other omics datasets collected simultaneously at each time point, including data from the transcriptome, microbiome, proteome and metabolome. He will also present a novel computational approach combining all available omics datasets into a predictive model that reveals unique interactions between the different pacemakers of pregnancy. https://nalab.stanford.edu/