Advanced Flow Cytometry in Immuno-Oncology: Advancing the Development of Immunotherapies
In the last few decades, the discovery of novel immuno-therapies has revolutionized cancer treatment. These therapies, namely chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells, checkpoint inhibitors, and antibodies, harness the body’s own immune system to fight cancer. Unlike traditional therapeutic approaches such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy, immunotherapy has a greater level of target specificity, which can reduce damage to healthy tissue and thereby minimize side effects.
Despite the success and therapeutic promise, challenges remain, such as developing preclinical models that recapitulate an endogenous tumor environment and human immunity, or elucidating a mechanistic basis behind differing patient outcomes. Answering these questions and more, requires improved next-generation technologies.
Overview
Traditional flow cytometry has played an instrumental role in understanding the biology of immune cell types, yet it is limited in throughput. Modern drug discovery candidate programs often require the integration of immunophenotyping data with measurements of cell health, cytokine secretion, etc., to provide more biological relevance to the data.
Although classical flow cytometry can identify distinct cell types in a heterogeneous sample, it cannot analyze cellular health or characterize function; these additional analyses would need to be performed separately. To overcome these issues, many scientists have turned to advanced flow cytometry. By combining multiplexed analysis in a single well, one can simultaneously acquire information regarding immune cell function (i.e., immunophenotyping, cell health, secreted protein), thereby accelerating their research.
In this article collection, we will examine how advanced flow cytometry can further the development of immunotherapies.
Page count: 114
Read time: 10 hours
Target audience: Immuno-oncologists, Neuroscientists, Cancer Immunotherapy Drug Discovery Researchers, in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, biopharmaceuticals, contract research organizations, research institutes, clinical laboratories and academia.
This article collection includes the following chapters from experts in the field:
- New directions in chimeric antigen receptor T cell [CAR-T] therapy and related flow cytometry
- Best practices for the development, analytical validation and clinical implementation of flow cytometric methods for chimeric antigen receptor T cell analyses
- Development and functional characterization of novel fully human anti-CD19 chimeric antigen receptors for T-cell therapy
- CXCR2-modified CAR-T cells have enhanced trafficking ability that improves treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma
- Increased expression of immune checkpoint programmed cell death protein-1 (PD-1) on T cell subsets of bone marrow aspirates in patients with B-Lymphoblastic leukemia, especially in relapse and at diagnosis
- Novel 3D Lung Tumor Spheroids for Oncoimmunological Assays
- Quantifying T Cell Response in 3D Tumor Spheroids Using Advanced Flow Cytometry Workflows
