SBIR/STTR Award attributes
Project Summary Therapies based on Chimeric Antigen ReceptorsCARor T Cell ReceptorsTCRhave shown incredible potential as personalized immunotherapies for cancer patients which involves enrichment and modification of immune cells to express targeting moieties against cancer cellsStudies have shown that deriving therapies from well defined sets of cell subpopulations have superior potency and sustained reaction compared to therapies derived from heterogenous populations and represents a direction of growth for the cell therapy industry in order to take on more complex and elusive diseasesUnfortunatelycurrent cell purification platformssuch as flow cytometry and magnetic assisted cell sortingstruggle to balance the throughput and quantitative power needed to precisely enrich the target cell subpopulations for scalable manufacture of precision immunotherapiesWe reasoned that a tool that balanced quantitative cell sorting capacity with high throughput operation would alleviate this bottleneck and enable development of more nuanced and multifaceted therapiesWith preliminary studieswe demonstrated a prototype platform based on a technique called ratcheting cytometry that can achieve quantitative sorting of target cell subpopulations by multiplexing on magnetic bead strengthIn this proposalwe aim to develop a high throughput batch purification cartridge and instrument that can precisely enrich target cell subpopulations directly from complex biomatrix samplessuch as a leukopak or apheresis productIn phase I we will focus on optimizing the quantitative separation parameters to maximize capture and purity of multiple target cell typesIn phase II we will focus on scaling the platform to meet with cell manufacturing throughput requirements Project Narrative The goal of this project is to develop a cell purification platform to enrich specific cell types from complex biomatrices which are needed to manufacture precision cancer immunotherapiesCurrent technologies cannot balance quantitative multiparameter cell sorting capacity with high throughput operationOur platform technology can achieve quantitative cell sorting but can be easily scaled to manufacturing operation
