Complementary methods for the study of interactions between eosinophils and cancer cells.

Abstract

Eosinophils are a rare immune cell subset with important roles in Th2 immunity and, recently, in cancer. Interleukin IL-33 (IL-33) is well recognized for its important roles in the activation of eosinophils in Th2 immunity. On the other hand, IL-33 has been recently discovered to play central roles in cancer, in particular by activating eosinophils and increase their degranulation consequent to an intrinsic tumor cell killing function. We propose a dual approach methodology to extrapolate functional interactions of eosinophils with tumor cells, as a result of eosinophil stimulation. Human eosinophils (Eos) isolated from the blood of healthy donors by dextran sedimentation followed by magnetic sorting are exposed to IL-33 (Eos33) or IL-5 (Eos5, control) for 18 h. These pre-conditioned cells are then co-cultured with A375P melanoma cells to monitor cell-cell interactions. Acoustic focusing flow cytometry analysis is employed to evaluate the presence of Eos-tumor cell conjugates after 1h incubation of human eosinophils and A375P melanoma cells. Moreover, a 24 h time-lapse video recording approach is employed to obtain single cell tracking Eos profiles. This allows to quantitatively determine the interaction extent of Eos33, as opposed to Eos5 (control condition), with tumor cells. In conclusion, our protocols easily and quickly allow the extrapolation of relevant kinematic and biologically relevant parameters for tumor reactive eosinophils. Furthermore, these methods are adaptable to various models with other types of immune cell subsets and cancer cells and can be implemented on different video microscopy platforms and advanced flow cytometry systems.