Microenvironment on Demand: A breakthrough technology for personalized cell therapy discoveries

NCI estimates that cancer will be the leading cause of death in 2030, worldwide.  Checkpoint inhibitors and adoptive cell therapies (ACTs) cost up to ~$2 million/patient and have shown durable responses in a few patients while many patients experience life-threatening side-effects. So, there is a critical need to identify cost-effective therapies to treat cancer with minimal to no side-effects.  Deep mapping of cancer antigens and their cognate immune cells is one approach that has the potential for more universal/targeted treatment. However, no methods exist that can identify cancer antigens and their cognate immune cells functionally and link phenotypic readouts to antigen and immune cell DNA sequences, 100k-1M cell combinations at a time. We will show proof-of-concept for the MOD platform that integrates three technologies after fluorescently-labeled single-cells are encapsulated in droplets – droplet-based cell-sorting and merging, single-cell-based interferon-gamma assays and selective sequencing of T-cell receptor variable regions based on interferon-gamma signals.

Learning Objectives:

1. Importance of linked neoantigen/TCR sequence information

2. Microenvironment on demand technology’s role in screening for adoptive cancer cell therapies (T-cell and CAR-Ts)