MIMIC™ Components

Three components comprise the MIMIC™ system:

• Vaccination Site (VS): Peripheral tissue where the vaccine or the pathogen from the outside world initiates contact with the immune cells of your body.
• Lymphoid Tissue Equivalent (LTE): An artificial lymph node, where antigen-presenting cells from the immune system, the body’s “sentinel” cells, start working with the immune system’s T and B cells.
• Functional assays: The functional assays could comprise neutralizing Ab, hemaggluttin inhibition, CTL responses, or a disease model.

Modularity

The immunological constructs that make up the MIMIC™ system are designed to be modular in nature. Each module can function independently as a minimal model of localized immune response against antigens (Ags), vaccines, pathogens and inflammatory signals. The modularity of the MIMIC™ technology provides the flexibility needed during development and characterization, and it also provides the possibility of obtaining predictive value of the sentinels of immunity, APCs, using minimal models.

Click for a larger, more detailed version.

As illustrated, each half of the system is treated separately and only combined in the final step of testing. The system's simplicity allows us to automate it because the system requires only the simple adding and transferring of components between individual wells.