6533b81ffe1ef96bd1277332

RESEARCH PRODUCT

T cell assays and MIATA: the essential minimum for maximum impact.

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The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, USA*Correspondence: cedrik.britten@tron-mainz.dehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.immuni.2012.07.010The field of immunology has recentlyexperienced enormous advances fromwhich most have so far not been incorpo-rated into standard medical practice (Da-vis, 2008). One approach to fully exploitthe existing wealth of knowledge is toimplement a systematic strategy to eval-uate the immune system. The potentialbenefit of such an approach is that itmay lead to results that can be translatedinto the rational development of diagnos-tics and therapeutics (Hoos et al., 2011).Two prerequisites for its application arethat (1) applied immune assays lead toreproducible results (van der Burg et al.,2011), and (2) sets of experimental resultswill be reported and deposited in a waythat supports maximum use of data (Ja-netzki et al., 2009; Sansone et al., 2012).The task of establishing robust assayshas been shown to be particularly chal-lenging for cellular assays. This hasled to multiple independent activities toharmonize and standardize immuneassays(vanderBurgetal.,2011;Maeckeret al., 2010; Roep et al., 2012). Experi-ments conducted by more than 100 labsshowed that (1) a plethora of differentprotocols exists, (2) results generatedacrossinstitutionsvarygreatly,(3)multipleprocess steps contribute to test variation,(4) many labs performing T cell assays donot control critical process steps, and (5)the majority of reports comprising resultsfrom T cell assay experiments lack criticalinformation. At first these findings weremet with skepticism, given that theyseemed to contradict promising resultsshowing that cellular assays can consti-tute robust tools to quantify antigen-specific T cell responses. However, boththe optimistic and the pessimistic viewhave validity. T cell assays can delivercompelling performance in the hands ofskilled researchers. Nonetheless, pullingdata from heterogeneous groups of labsdemonstrates that controlling the perfor-mance of cellular assays requires explicitknowledgeoftheircriticalprotocoldetails.Notably,publicationslackingthosecriticalprotocol details may be difficult to inter-pret and to reproduce. Such reportingissues have the potential to hamper prog-ress in the field.To provide a solution, the Minimal Infor-mationaboutTCellAssays(MIATA)projectwas initiated in 2009 (Janetzki et al.,2009) as a field-spanning initiative whosemain objective is to generate a broadlyacceptable framework for the reporting ofresultsfromcommonlyusedTcellassays,which is envisioned to be expandable tonew, complex assays (Sharma et al.,2011; for a full list of MIATA contributors,see http://www.miataproject.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4&Itemid=6).The generated MIATA guidelines pre-sented here are the outcome of one ofthe most intensive community-widevetting processes in the field of immu-nology so far (Britten et al., 2011). Thisprocess and all its steps are transparentlydisplayed at the project’s website (www.miataproject.org). Importantly, MIATA isImmunity 37, July 27, 2012 a2012 Elsevier Inc. 1