Werner Dammermann, Brandenburg Medical School, Brandenburg an der Havel, Germany

Cellular immunity has so far played only a minor role for in vitro diagnostics (IVD). Serological tests 
dominate the field of immunoassays for infectious and autoimmune diseases, although humoral immunity represents only one part of the human immune system. Notably, tuberculosis, CMV and HIV 

infections form few exceptions where standard of care mandates monitoring the immune status, bacterial as well as viral latency. Autoimmune disease diagnostics are solely antibody-based due to the minute frequency of autoreactive immune cells. Still, there is a rising clinical need for robust and high quality cellbased immunoassays to monitor autoimmune diseases and develop therapeutic vaccines for e.g. chronic hepatitis B. Here we present a state of the art analysis and view at future developments regarding cellbased immunoassays in IVD as well as basic clinical research.