2020 SITC Poster

The success of autologous CAR-T cell therapies has revolutionized and accelerated development in the cell therapy field. However, the requirement for patient-specific starting material for these therapies remains an impediment to establishing availability for all patients who could benefit, highlighting the need for a highly characterized normal donor pool to generate allogeneic cell therapy material.

Discovery Life Sciences has established a network of >2800 normal donors that have been genotyped at the HLA loci (6 digits), stratified by reactivity to common human viruses and cell collections from 35 randomly selected donors have been screened by flow cytometry for major immune cell subsets, including T cells, B cells, NK cells, and monocytes. The T cell compartment was further characterized by expression of activation markers (CD25, PD1, CD69) and proliferative capacity in response to anti-CD3/CD28 stimulation.

Data presented herein highlight the need for in-depth genotypic and phenotypic characterization of donor populations to ensure that the most robust material is selected for each type of cell therapy manufacturing.