Immunotherapy: Open Access
Open Access
ISSN: 2471-9552
ISSN: 2471-9552
Sofie Pattijn, Brecht Hoedemaekers, S�©verine Giltaire, Juliette Lamy and Thibault Jonckheere
ImmunXperts SA, rue Auguste Piccard 48, 6041 Gosselies, Belgium
Posters & Accepted Abstracts: Immunotherapy (Los Angel)
During the last years, significant advancement has been made in the clinical application of cancer immunotherapies. Molecules directed against immune checkpoints and other agonists show great promise for treatment of a variety of malignancies. Next to CTLA-4 and PD-1 blockade, a wide range of therapeutics with the potential to reverse the tumorinduced suppression are under development. Early evaluation of the effectiveness of candidate therapeutics and combination therapies can be done using mouse models and in vitro bioassays with human immune cells. Mixed lymphocyte reaction assays using both innate cells and lymphoid cells mimic a real physiological T cell response and are widely used for the potency screening of candidate therapeutics. The use of different allogenic donor combinations can provide additional information on the profile of the responding population. An important factor for sensitive assays and consistent results is the quality of the primary immune cells. PBMC are isolated and cryopreserved shortly after blood redrawn. All donor preparations are quality controlled and HLA typed and optimized procedures are used to generate functional dendritic cells which are co-cultured with allogenic T cells. Response levels can be evaluated by the assessment of proliferation or measurement of cytokine production. Next to the MLR assay, other T cell assays such as antigen-specific recall activation assays can be used to evaluate the ability of test molecules to promote T cell responses. In addition to T cell assays, macrophage polarization assays are an essential tool to evaluate metabolic or other reprogramming functions of test compounds.