Immune Assay Proficiency/Harmonization Panels

The Consortium established the Immune Assay Proficiency Panel Program to help facilitate and harmonize immune monitoring approaches in the cancer immunotherapy field.

CIC members are provided with the opportunity to participate in worldwide immune assay proficiency panels and other initiatives aimed at minimizing variability and promoting transparency and reproducibility in immune assay monitoring data, data interpretation, and data reporting.

The Proficiency Panel Program seeks to:

• Identify:

• issues and deficiencies of current assay practices;

• sources for assay variability within and among institutions;

• protocol details that optimize assay performance.

• Define criteria for and support harmonization and validation of the assay for member laboratories

• Determine the value of resulting criteria in the cancer immunotherapy community

• Offer training programs to Consortium members to enhance assay performance and comparability between laboratories

• Establish immune assays as standard monitoring tools

To date, the CIC has completed panels for Elispot, peptidemultimer assays, intracellular cytokine staining, and Luminex, and has published harmonization guidelines for Elispot and HLA-peptide multimer assays.