KEY TAKEAWAYS
- The collaboration of NanoString and Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy aims to characterize up to 1,000 apheresis and cellular therapy infusion products to identify molecular pathways and features that correlate with optimal cellular therapies.
- Gene Expression Profiles (GEPs) identified biomarkers and signatures for clinical response and toxicity and explored cancer-specific and general characteristics associated with effective chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells.
- The initial phase of gene expression analysis for multiple CAR-T cell products across both primary and metastatic hematological and solid tumors is being presented. Meta-analysis will be performed using the aggregated data set alongside individual site-specific analyses.
- The study is expected to improve the safety and efficacy of cell therapy products, and data will be publicly available to the scientific community.
Cellular therapy is still one of the best bets if they want to find better ways to treat cancer. However, a comprehensive molecular understanding of cell therapy products and identification of factors contributing to their safety and efficacy are required to make advancements. With the primary aim of identifying molecular pathways and features that correlate with optimal cellular therapies, NanoString and the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI) have formed a ground-breaking collaboration to characterize up to 1,000 apheresis and cellular therapy infusion products.
They identify biomarkers and signatures for clinical response and toxicity by studying Gene Expression Profiles (GEPs) that correlate with optimal apheresis and downstream cellular products using a large and diverse sample cohort collected from four (and eventually eight in Phase II) PICI network Cell Therapy Centers. Researchers are looking at what makes chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells beneficial in treating certain cancers. The nCounter CAR-T Characterization Panel is being used to characterize the samples, and it includes a standard set of genes for measuring metabolic fitness, TCR diversity, toxicity, activation, persistence, exhaustion, and cell type abundances, as well as individual transgenic expression.
Here, they share the results of an initial stage of gene expression study for numerous CAR-T cell products in primary and metastatic hematological and solid malignancies. The collected data set will be used for both site-specific analyses and meta-analyses. In addition, they plan to look into variations in cancer kinds and target types, as well as connections between manufacturing conditions, gene expression, and results.
This represents the initial publication of data from a ground-breaking investigation into the properties of GEPs in CAR-T cells. They believe these discoveries will lead to advancements in the safety and efficacy of cell therapy products, and they anticipate this data will be beneficial across many stages of cellular therapy R&D, production, and clinical use. The results of this endeavor will be made available to researchers everywhere.
Source: https://jitc.bmj.com/content/10/Suppl_2/A1527
Clinical trial: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03625323
Church, S., Bailey, C., Phan, P., White, A., Butterfield, L., Liang, S. and Howes, T. (2022). 1468 First data readout of standardized transcriptional profiling for optimizing cellular therapies: A multi-center PICI-NanoString collaboration. Late-Breaking Abstracts. doi:https://doi.org/10.1136/jitc-2022-sitc2022.1468.
