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Natural killers: Cataloging immune cells for immunotherapy

Nature Medicine volume 21, pages 207–208 (2015)Cite this article

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The wider adoption of a technology called CyTOF—short for cytometry by time of flight–is now making NK cell research more tractable, allowing scientists to classify and describe NK cell subsets at a level never before possible. Using this technology, Catherine Blish and Peter Parham, two immunologists at Stanford University School of Medicine, recently described 30,000 unique NK cell subsets found among 22 healthy individuals (Sci. Transl. Med. 5, 208ra145, 2013). And that may just scratch the surface; statistical extrapolation suggests there may be three times as many NK cell subsets within the study population alone.

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  1. Amanda B. Keener is a former news intern at Nature Medicine in New York and currently a freelance writer in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.,

    Amanda B. Keener

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Keener, A. Natural killers: Cataloging immune cells for immunotherapy. Nat Med 21, 207–208 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm0315-207

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