Rapid, No-wash Measurement of Immune Checkpoint Molecules and Cytokines in Co-cultures of Immune Cells and Cancer Cell Lines

Breast cancer tumors can adapt to immune cell infiltration by responding to the increased concentration of interferon gamma (IFN-ɣ) and other cytokines secreted by subsets of T lymphocytes with the upregulation of the immune checkpoint proteins such as Programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1). These checkpoint proteins allow the tumors to evade immune targeting and reduce the immune response, thus promoting tumor progression.

In this application note, you will learn:

• How exogenous addition of IFN-ɣ effects the expression of PD-L1 and secretion of several cytokines in cultures of HCC38 cells (a triple-negative breast cancer cell line)
• How co-culturing activated immune cells and breast cancer cells stimulates differential expression of some immune checkpoint and inflammatory biomarkers compared to culturing cells alone with PBMC-conditioned media
• How to rapidly measure multiple biomarkers in cell culture supernatant and lysates from the same wells of a culture dish to examine protein expression profiles from cancer and immune cell culture models using AlphaLISA^® assays together with ATPlite^™ 1step and the EnVision^® multimode plate reader.