Traditionally, natural killer (NK) cell-mediated lysis of K562 tumour cells required laborious, time-consuming, radioactive chromium release assays (CRA). But no longer. CTL has introduced Target Cell Visualization Assay (TVA™), a fast, simple, non-radioactive, direct-imaging-based NK assay.

The TVA™ utilises direct imaging of fluorescence-labelled target cells. Labelled K562 tumour cells are co-incubated with peripheral blood mononuclear cell (PBMC) populations containing NK cells at varying effector-to-target cell ratios.

Following NK-mediated lysis, target cells lose their fluorescent signal. The direct visualisation of remaining viable target cells at the end of an assay period determines the percentage of cytotoxicity for each effector-to-target ratio.

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