Jonathan Stockton

• MSci Biomedical Sciences
• Characterisation of putative circulating macrophages by Imaging Flow Cytometry

Circulating tumour cells (CTC) are an extremely rare population of epithelial cells found in the peripheral blood of some carcinoma patients. Technologies now exist that can detect these cells at a frequency of 1 per ml whole blood, compared to the millions of leucocytes and billions of erythrocytes in the same volume. Detection of these cells is associated with poor prognosis in some cancers. However, given the low frequency of CTCs and poor imaging properties of some technologies used to investigate them, there are concerns that other rare cell populations may be resulting in false positive counts. Among these are putative circulating macrophages. The student will induce differentiation of the promyelocytic HL60 cell line to a macrophage phenotype with Phorbol 12-myristate 13-acetate and stain the differentiated and solvent control cells with macrophage reactive antibodies. Once specificity of the antibody has been established the student will incubate whole blood from healthy volunteers to detect circulating macrophages.

Funding source: Newcastle University