2026 Meeting at Wiley

​​The MetroFlow NY/NJ Flow Cytometry Users Group invites you to attend our annual meeting on October 23th, 2026.

We are planning a full day of scientific presentations and are excited to be hosted by Wiley Center at 111 River St, Hoboken, NJ 07030.

• Talks will run from 9am-5pm, with ample time over breaks to meet with our corporate sponsors.

  
  

• The meeting will conclude with a wine & cheese reception with excellent opportunities for networking.

Abstracts

Stephanie Z. Xie

Hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) have enormous regeneration capacity (~10E11 cells daily in the human). Adult humans are estimated to have 50,000 to 200,000 HSC contributing to hematopoiesis at any one time. Understanding the functional diversity of human HSC across a lifetime is crucial for promoting healthy aging, advancing medicine, and improving therapeutic strategies for hematological disorders. Age-related increase in inflammation is well-recognized to be a major risk factor for many diseases including cancer, heart disease and diabetes. Aging also strongly increases the risk for HSC to acquire mutations, which results in expansion of mutated blood cells in the blood and in various tissues in the body, a pre-leukemia process called clonal hematopoiesis. Flow cytometry has long been a cornerstone for interrogating HSC heterogeneity. We set out to understand if HSC inflammation responses underpin aging-associated disease outcomes by developing inflammatory recovery xenograft models and isolating HSC for downstream single cell molecular profiling. We identified inflammatory memory in a subset of human hematopoietic stem cells (HSC-iM), a heritable epigenetic and transcriptional state characterized by quiescence and inflammation signatures. HSC-iM links environmental inflammatory exposures to stem cell fate and diverse human conditions, including infection, aging, clonal hematopoiesis (CH), and mortality risk. We will discuss the workflow, key technical considerations, data integration strategies, and insights gained into the mechanistic regulation of human HSC function after inflammatory challenge. This platform provides a powerful framework for dissecting stem cell biology at unprecedented resolution and uncovering novel biomarkers and therapeutic targets in normal and malignant human hematopoiesis.

Nithianandan Selliah

Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapy has transformed the treatment landscape for hematologic malignancies and is rapidly expanding into new therapeutic indications. As both autologous and allogeneic CAR-T products advance through clinical development, flow cytometry remains a critical tool for monitoring cell therapy kinetics, persistence, phenotype, and immune reconstitution.

While autologous CAR-T monitoring is relatively straightforward, the emergence of allogeneic "off-the-shelf" CAR-T products has introduced new analytical challenges. Traditional flow cytometric approaches often require modification because allogeneic products may lack conventional T-cell markers such as CD3 following gene editing, necessitating alternative gating strategies and CAR-specific detection methods.

This presentation will highlight practical considerations and real-world challenges encountered during flow cytometric monitoring of CAR-T clinical trials. Topics will include strategies for identifying and enumerating CAR-T cells, differences between autologous and allogeneic monitoring approaches, selection of CAR detection reagents, and interpretation of complex immunophenotyping data. Special emphasis will be placed on challenges associated with TBNK analysis in allogeneic CAR-T studies, where CAR-T cells within the CD3-negative compartment can complicate accurate identification of NK-cell populations.

David Rach

Spectral Flow Cytometry (SFC) with its increased analytical breadth and width, has been a game changer for researchers working with limited biospecimen, enabling greater profiling of immune systems, and responses to infection and immunization. While community adoption of the technology has been rapid, the capacity to analyze the resulting high-dimensional datasets has not similarly scaled.

While analysis of a single cell population remains essentially unchanged, to fully explore the acquired datasets requires the use of unsupervised and semi-supervised algorithmic approaches. Existing methods, many originally intended for use with mass cytometry and single-cell RNA seq data, often struggle with SFC datasets due to increased number of events, and batch effects arising from the uncertainty inherent in the unmixing process. Consequently, the biological discovery potential of the technology remains under-leveraged for most datasets, with existing analysis just skimming the surface.

To address these technology specific challenges, we have been developing open-source toolsets in R and Rust. These have allowed us to screen unmixing controls for tandem degradation and additional autofluorescence, as well as detect failures in instrument quality control. We highlight some of our on-going work in the context of a semi-supervised analysis of a rare clinical cohort of HIV-exposed uninfected (HEU) neonates, additionally leveraging existing tool-sets from the R/Bioconductor ecosystem to provide a more replicable framework in the analysis of multiple SFC panels.

All the while, we contemplate the broader question: “What good is any tool, if the vast majority of the community is unable to use it?”

Krystal Hudson

Red blood cell (RBC) transfusion is one of the most common therapeutic procedures performed worldwide and remains a cornerstone of care for patients with sickle cell disease (SCD). Although transfusions can be lifesaving, some recipients develop alloantibodies against donor RBC antigens, creating substantial challenges for future transfusion support and contributing to adverse outcomes in transfusion, pregnancy, and transplantation. Despite the clinical significance of RBC alloimmunization, the factors that govern why some antibody responses develop and persist remain poorly understood.

Recent work from our laboratory has identified reticulocytes, immature RBCs that are markedly elevated in SCD and other hemolytic disorders, as unexpected regulators of humoral immunity. This presentation will discuss evidence demonstrating that reticulocytes promote RBC alloantibody responses and will highlight how flow cytometric approaches have enabled the characterization of erythroid-immune cell interactions. Findings from flow cytometry, imaging flow cytometry, confocal microscopy, and intravital imaging have revealed previously unappreciated interactions between reticulocytes and immune cells, providing new insights into how stress erythropoiesis influences antibody responses. Collectively, these findings challenge the traditional view of reticulocytes as passive erythroid precursors and establish a new role for stress erythropoiesis in the regulation of adaptive immunity.

Yolanda Mahnke

Every academic scientist is involved in the world of scientific publishing to some degree – if nothing else, as an author. My own journey has taken me from being a scientist and author to my current role as Senior Associate Editor of Cytometry Part A, ISAC’s journal, published by Wiley.

Over the years, my engagement with scientific publishing has expanded well beyond manuscript authorship and peer review. My interactions with Wiley have grown both in scope and depth as we work to strengthen the partnership between Cytometry Part A and Wiley, and, more broadly, the connection between the journal, ISAC, and its annual CYTO conference.

In this presentation, I will share some of the projects and initiatives I have been involved in along the way, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the different facets of scientific publishing and how my role as a scientist has evolved through these experiences.