A final complimentary effort in the laboratory focuses on developing technologies to monitor and manipulate immune cells, guiding future intervention strategies through new fundamental insights into the function of the immune system, and providing new strategies to monitor immunity in humans. Traditional clinical assays of the human immune system largely rely on blood samples may provide an incomplete picture of immunity and responses to infection or tumors that occur in tissues.  Using our microneedle skin patch platform, we are designing microneedles that sample living cells from skin, mucosa, and other tissues, to enable assessment of the function and phenotype of immune cells either locally resident or recruited to peripheral tissues as a new way to gain insight into the function of the immune system in the locations where immune reactions occur.