Turku Immunology Centre

The Turku Immunology Centre is a joint center of the University of Turku and the Hospital District of Southwest Finland promoting top-level immunological research.

The Centre will develop and set up an automated multiomics immunoprofiling platform (MULTIPRO) to provide state-of-the art techniques that are currently neither locally nor nationally available.

Turku has the largest concentration of immunology research groups in Finland, the largest fraction of country’s pharma and diagnostic industry, and the most successful translation of immunology discoveries to the clinic.

The new infrastructure, stemming from the proposed project, will synergize with existing services by providing new and complementary methods, automating various existing workflows, and unifying sample collection and processing across multiple analytical modalities.

This will further facilitate top-level translational research and offer significant advantages to the local pharma and biotech sectors.

Automation improves the accessibility of advanced immunofluorescence and spatially resolved omics techniques, and transitions many ongoing services to a high-throughput and in-depth environment with a dramatically improved ability to perform large-scale clinical studies.

MULTIPRO is designed to integrate multiple complementary analyses from the same sample, and with extensive automation, will bring maximum efficiency to the lab, thereby promoting green and digital transition.

The proposed platform will expand spatially resolved techniques by using a Bruker timsTOF flex mass spectrometer, which offers unparalleled performance for many applications, and a Leica Thunder Imaging system, whose powerful image deconvolution software enables rapid image acquisition.

A dedicated fast imaging system is required to take full advantage of the synergy between hyperplex immunofluorescence and mass spectrometry imaging resulting from the combination of high-resolution and high-depth data from the same tissue section.

Cytometry capabilities are further developed with a BD CellView S8 cell sorter, which expands the sorting capabilities to up to 40 biomarkers and provides imaging-based analysis.

This added functionality will enable researchers to multiplex more fluorescent labels per sample and perform immunophenoprofiling along with effective sorting of several challenging cell populations for downstream studies.