While T-cell analysis can reveal much about how the immune system works, it can be prohibitively expensive and logistically impractical.

A St. Jude initiative has overcome these limitations by creating a method that provides the most complete picture of a person’s entire T-cell repertoire to date, at 10% of the cost of pre-existing approaches. The technique and its initial findings were published today in Nature Methods.

The new technique, Throughput-Intensive Rapid TCR Library sequencing (TIRTL-seq), performed far better than existing methods. In the study, the researchers showed they could accurately process up to 30 million T cells at one time, greatly expanding on the maximum limit of 20 thousand cells for the most common current techniques. Additionally, while the conventional approach costs about $2,000 to process 20 thousand cells and requires scientists to run the method multiple times, TIRTL costs $200 for 10 million cells, which scientists could analyze in a single run.