Annual and Interim Progress Report Summaries
Principal Investigator: Steve Self
Project: Vaccine Immunology Statistical Center
Submitted January 19, 2010 (Interim Report)
The Vaccine Immunology Statistical Center is organized within the CAVD to provide services in the areas of statistical design and data analysis, a central repository for key CAVD studies, and support for laboratory data management. Our diverse staff has expertise in the areas of biostatistics, immunologic assays, bioinformatics, data management, and information systems. We ensure that CAVD studies are efficient by providing state-of-the-art statistical methods and, when required, develop novel methods.
Areas of methodological development and consultation by the VISC include work on analytic methods for assessing immunological correlates of risk and of protection, the design of repeated low-dose challenge non-human primate studies, signal processing and normalization of flow cytometry-based assays, models for the analysis of multivariate outcomes in mouse immunogenicity experiments, and the analysis of high-dimensional immunologic checkerboard data.
The VISC continues to work closely with the CAVD Vaccine Immune Monitoring Consortia – the CA VIMC and the CTC VIMC – in the testing and standardization of antibody and T Cell assays within and between core labs. These efforts include labs based in the United States, Europe, Africa and Asia. Current assay projects include the standardized TZM-bl neutralizing antibody assay, the clinical ELISpot assay (Transfer Study and Internal Quality Assurance), the clinical ICS Flow assay (pre-Qualification and Qualification), and the CTC VIMC’s nonhuman primate core assays (ELISpot and ICS Flow).
We also design data models for novel immunologic assays and engineer integrated data pipelines from lab instruments to upload data into the CAVD central data repository. Finally, we support service data access, data sharing, and collaboration through a customized web portal available to the large community of CAVD investigators.