Abstract
The use of nanoparticles as drug delivery carriers requires analysis of their safety, which among other tests, includes immunotoxicity. Nanoparticles are also increasingly used for applications intended to specifically activate, inhibit, or modify the immune system's responses to improve the treatment of inflammatory and autoimmune disorders, cancer immunotherapy, and vaccines targeting cancer cells and viral and bacterial pathogens. In addition to the safety, the analysis of nanoparticles intended for immune system targeting includes mechanistic immunology investigations. Immunophenotyping provides researchers with a tool to assess the immune cell viability and activation status. These results provide mechanistic insights into nanoparticle efficacy and toxicity and therefore are of interest to the biomedical nanotechnology field. However, no standardized approaches exist due to the breadth of methods and instruments available for this analysis. This chapter provides detailed instructions for applying this methodology to analyze nanoparticle effects on subsets of immune cells present in peripheral blood. While this experimental strategy is specific to the NovoCyte 3005 flow cytometer, it can be adapted to other instruments. Instructions for instrument setup, calibration, and antibody qualification are described in this book's Chapter 24 , Immunophenotyping, part I.