Aerial view of the portion of the UChicago campus north of the Midway Plaisance

Core Facilities

Cutting-edge research requires access to cutting-edge tools and models and the most advanced equipment. The CIIC cores include transgenic immunological models, specialized equipment for immunophenotyping, and immunotherapeutic production pipelines. We share our tools and equipment (sometimes with usage fees to cover costs of upkeep and technical staff), provide training, and technical support for data acquisition and analysis.

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Getting Started

Consult your supervisor and core staff to identify mandatory training courses.

Murine bone marrow-derived macrophages on a dish (by Shann Yu)

In Vivo Immunological Models

CIIC researchers frequently make use of primary immune cells or in vivo models for their work. We have technicians trained for procedures including perfusion, injection, and harvest available to work alongside yourselves. We also regularly provide primary dendritic cells and T cells for basic in vitro and ex vivo assays.

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Image from the Tay lab showing microfluidic chips perfused with colorful fluids

Single-Cell Immunophenotyping

A whole immune response can start from a single cell. Our labs house the most cutting-edge flow cytometers, DNA/RNA sequencers, and single-cell level library preparation tools to enable researchers to gather both snapshots and dynamic data from single cells at unprecedented speed and depth.

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Close-up of fluidic valves on a GE Akta chromatography unit

Protein Production & Purification

(Coming soon!) Reducing your costs of acquiring endotoxin-free immunologic molecules for your experiments. Studying immune signaling pathways in vivo can be expensive when you’re buying all of your cytokines, chemokines, checkpoint blockade molecules, or co-stimulatory signals. With our help, you can express your proteins of interest in milligram quantities. We will help you with the purification. Consultation and fee-for-service models available.

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Postdoctoral scholar Priscilla Briquez describes her recent results to Prof. Melody Swartz

Software: Group Licenses

Immunoengineering research requires a lot of specialized software for presentation, data analytics and visualization, and the CIIC supports a number of these resources. 

We provide member labs with site licenses for some specialized software (below).

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Drone shot of the Eckhardt Research Center and Mansueto Library, looking south from along Ellis Ave

Acknowledgments

We encourage you to acknowledge CIIC support and team members who contribute to your manuscripts and grant proposals! This will help us continue to receive funding support and to continually improve our offerings to you moving forward.

As of Oct 2020, the CIIC receives internal funding support through the University of Chicago. CIIC flow cytometers are operated with support from the Cytometry and Antibody Core Facility and should therefore additionally acknowledge the Cancer Center Support Grant (NIH # P30-CA014599).

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