The mission of the trans-NIH CHI is cooperative research based on advanced technologies to efficiently translate an enhanced understanding of immune function and pathophysiology to the clinic. CHI research is technologically driven with the goal of understanding human immunology, and addressing pathophysiologically-related human diseases. This initiative is translational, but this overused term is defined here as both directly resulting in improved therapy of immune-mediated diseases and deriving important and often unique biologic information from the study of ill human beings.
The mission statement has three major components:
1. The Center is envisioned as a cooperative enterprise, with representatives from many NIH Institutes working together on focused projects with clear shared goals.
2. The Center will provide specific technologies often unavailable to individual laboratories because of cost, complexity, and novelty, incorporated into three technology centers dedicated to:
- Assays of immune cells and their products, mainly based on flow cytometry and other emerging multiplexed techniques;
- High-throughput systems technologies, involving the use of new methods for large scale examination of the genome, gene expression epigenetic modulation, as well as the proteome, lipidome, and metabolome, and the application of advanced biostatical and computer modeling methods for mining these diverse data to aid in understanding immune function and pathology;
- Protocol development, with staff dedicated to the efficient translation to the clinic with appropriate ethical and regulatory requirements for human research.
3. The Center’s focus is human immunology, normal but especially pathologic, with an emphasis on shared pathophysiologic mechanisms that underlie disease. This includes recognized immunologially-mediated diseases, organ specific autoimmunity, and the role of inflammation in a wide variety of common diseases, including cancer, atherosclerosis, and neurologic degeneration.
Although not a core facility, CHI is devoted to providing the NIH community with specific technologies often unavailable to individual laboratories. In line with this mission, CHI offers one of its platforms as a fee-for-service: the SOMAscan® assay.
SOMAscan Assay
WHAT IS IT?
The SOMAscan® assay is a sensitive, semi-quantitative novel proteomic biomarker discovery platform. The assay is founded on a new generation of protein-capture slow off-rate modified aptamer (SOMAmer®) reagents; SOMAmer reagents are chemically modified nucleotides with high-affinity to natively folded proteins. SOMAmer reagents have been created for over 1,300 proteins (47% secreted proteins, 28% extracellular proteins, 25% intracellular proteins) that belong to a broad range of biological subgroups including receptors, kinases, cytokines, proteases, growth factors, protease inhibitors, hormones, structural proteins, etc. For a complete list of protein targets, please refer to the following http://www.somalogic.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/SSM-045-Rev-2-SOMAscan-Assay-1.3k-Content.pdf.
The SOMAscan assay measures the proteins in less than 100 μL of serum, plasma, or other biological matrices through a SOMAmer-based DNA signal, and uses DNA microarrays as readout. There is a dynamic range of detection of 8 logs in concentration, the median lower limit of quantitation for all measured proteins is 0.3 picomolar (pM), and the median coefficient of variation (% CV) in replicate samples of 2%. Quality control (QC) and calibrators samples are provided by SomaLogic and are run together with internal site (CHI) QC samples. Data generated from these samples are used to assess inter assay variability each time CHI runs the assay.
CHI offers a Web Tool for Navigating and Plotting the SomaLogic, Inc. ADAT files (Version 0.1) to support preliminary data analyses of SOMAscan® assay data. The tool is open source and freely available at https://foocheung.shinyapps.io/soma_stats/.
For more information on running samples with CHI, please visit: https://chi.niaid.nih.gov/.
For more information on the assay, please refer to the company website: http://www.somalogic.com/
WHAT DOES IT COST?
$600/sample for HTS (Note: Not all matrices are supported by HTS. For those matrices, samples are run using the Manual Assay at a price of $700/sample)
WHO DO I CONTACT?