Establishment of personalized immunotherapy method for virus-infected diseases using lymphocyte chip

Recently, the emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases such as avian flu and AIDS, and other opportunistic or latent infectious diseases are threatening human beings. Immunotherapy via virus-specific monoclonal antibody and cytotoxic T cells is the most likely candidate to treat these fearful infectious diseases. We had developed a novel and innovative method, called 'lymphocyte chip', to isolate human antigen-specific antibody-secreting cells from peripheral blood of patients with infectious diseases. In this research, we improved the lymphocyte chip method to clone efficiently and rapidly (within 10 days) antigen specific-antibody or TCR genes from individual lymphocytes of virus-infected patients as well as cancer patients, which may facilitate personalized immunotherapy for infectious diseases as well as cancer.