CIMAC CyTOF Multi-Site Harmonization Raw FCS

The Cancer Immune Monitoring and Analysis Centers - Cancer Immunologic Data Commons (CIMAC-CIDC) initiative is to identify biomarkers of response to cancer immunotherapies, with CyTOF being one of the main platforms to do so. This experiment was conducted to evaluate data reproducibility and comparability on the CyTOF platform between different laboratories across the US when using a harmonized acquisition and staining protocol.
Conclusion:
CyTOF data was reproducible across all CIMAC sites with coefficient of variances (CVs) under 20% for identifying percentage of major immune populations in PBMCs. Two sets of reference control samples were generated. 1) Pre-stained: 4 PBMC donor lots spiked with Ta181 labeled Veri-cells were stained at a single site and shipped to all CIMAC sites in order to evaluate instrument acquisition reproducibility. 2) Site-stained: 4 PBMC donor lots along with an identical lot of lyophilized antibody cocktails were shipped to each CIMAC site and stained at each CIMAC site with the spike in Veri-cells in order to evaluate staining reproducibility.