Agilent - Breakthroughs in Immunotherapy- 2019 - 33

Breakthroughs in Immunotherapy

Game-Changing Platform Speeds Discovery and Development
Critical to the design and development of
effective immunotherapies such as chimeric
antigen receptor (CAR) T cells, checkpoint
inhibitors, and oncolytic viruses, is the ability
to monitor the potency of treatments against
target tumor cells in vitro. In addition to being
robust and simple, the ideal in vitro assay
should also be highly predictive of how the
therapy will behave in animal models and,
ultimately, in human patients.
To more closely mimic activity in vivo,
ACEA Biosciences - now a part of Agilent
Technologies - has developed the xCELLigence® Real-Time Cell Analysis (RTCA)
platform to quantitatively monitor cancer cell
killing over extended time periods. This labelfree and noninvasive technology captures the
response of adherent tumor cells to different
treatments through proprietary biosensors
embedded into custom microtiter plates.
The workflow is remarkably simple: plate and
incubate target tumor cells, add effector cells
to be tested, then let the xCELLigence platform
monitor tumor cell killing without further human
intervention. Although liquid tumors (that is,
blood cancers) are not naturally adherent, they
can also be monitored by the xCELLigence

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platform through ACEA Biosciences' antibodymediated tethering kits for use with these
custom plates.
The straightforward workflow makes it easy to
analyze multiple parameters simultaneously,
such as different doses of checkpoint inhibi-

tors or variations of CAR constructs. The high
sensitivity of this assay also enables low, physiologically relevant effector-to-target ratios to be
examined, and its continuous data monitoring
yields a complete and nuanced view of cancer
cell killing that is missed by endpoint data. n

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Agilent - Breakthroughs in Immunotherapy- 2019

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