Researchers devised a way to miniaturize cell production for cancer treatment. The method for producing CAR-T cells, developed at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, uses fewer resources and a smaller footprint than existing automated manufacturing platforms and could lead to more affordable methods of cell therapy manufacturing.
Researchers from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT's research enterprise in Singapore, have developed a novel way to produce clinical doses of viable autologous chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cells in a ultra-small automated closed-system microfluidic chip, roughly the size of a pack of cards. This is the first time that a microbioreactor is used to produce autologous cell therapy products. Specifically, the new method was successfully used to manufacture and expand CAR-T cells that are as effective as cells produced using existing systems in a smaller footprint and less space, and using fewer seeding cell numbers and cell manufacturing reagents. This could lead to more efficient and affordable methods of scaling-out autologous cell therapy manufacturing, and could even potentially enable point-of-care manufacturing of CAR T-cells outside of a laboratory setting — such as in hospitals and wards. CAR T-cell therapy manufacturing requires the isolation, activation, genetic modification, and expansion of a patient's own T-cells to kill tumor cells upon reinfusion into the patient. Despite how cell therapies have revolutionized cancer immunotherapy, with some of the first patients who received autologous cell therapies in remission for more than 10 years, the manufacturing process for CAR-T cells has remained inconsistent, costly, and time-consuming. It can be prone to contamination, subject to human error, and requires seeding cell numbers that are impractical for smaller-scale CAR T-cell production. These challenges create bottlenecks that restrict both the availability and affordability of these therapies despite their effectiveness. In a paper titled "A high-density microbioreactor process designed for automated point-of-care manufacturing of CAR T cells" published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, SMART researchers detailed their breakthrough: Human primary T-cells can be activated, transduced, and expanded to…