Agilent - Breakthroughs in Immunotherapy- 2019 - 26

Breakthroughs in Immunotherapy

and we're now seeing that this is true for immunotherapy as well.
We're trying to predict how tumors might evade our therapies so
we can develop strategies to head that off.
Dr. Bamdad: I believe the underlying problem is how the cells are
being handled in vitro before they're given back to the patients.
It's looking more like the longer they're cultured in vitro, the worse
it is for the patient, because as these cells mature, the distribution of the different subpopulations of T cells changes. This has
a negative impact on persistence (that is, how long they will be
effective in the patient) and also on what is called the cytokine
storm, or neurotoxicity. Our understanding of this topic
is increasing exponentially.
Dr. MacLeod: In CAR T cell- and other T cell-mediated therapies, one of the big reasons for variability is the use of a patient's
own cells. Instead of taking an autologous approach, at Precision
Biosciences, we are engineering healthy donor cells to transfer
into unrelated patients, and this allogeneic approach allows us to
make something more defined, more consistent. This is evident
when we use assays to evaluate the function of these products
such as the cytotoxicity assays developed by ACEA Biosciences
for the xCELLigence instrument.
Dr. Golubovskaya: Patients differ in their immune profiles,
and tumors differ in the biomarkers they present. We cannot
predict these differences, and we rely on analyzing these
biomarkers in each patient to help us predict their response
to immunotherapy.
26

| GENengnews.com

Kristin Anderson, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
University of Washington

"Adaptive resistance is not very
well understood yet, but it's going
to be a problem for many types of
immunotherapy."

http://www.GENengnews.com

Agilent - Breakthroughs in Immunotherapy- 2019

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