Ask the Expert: Immunological responses to stroke

Strokes are a major contributor to morbidity and mortality worldwide. Understanding and improving patient outcomes after stroke requires increased knowledge of the underlying processes associated with neurological recovery after stroke. There is increasing interest in understanding and identifying neurotoxic cytokine products, brain-immune interactions, tissue damage and recovery, and immune cell homeostasis. Immune cell phenotyping and cytokine profiling is a key step towards identifying therapeutic targets to elucidate and alleviate stroke pathogenesis. Advanced flow cytometry, which combines high-throughput sampling and advanced data analytics, enables rapid cell phenotyping and cytokine quantitation to uncover key insights of inflammatory-related neurobiology.