Co-Founder & CEO ImmunitasBio Private Limited Bangalore , Karnataka, India
The novel therapies like cell and gene therapies require monitoring of immune responses through evaluation of the cellular and humoral immunity. While humoral immune responses can be measured as antibodies to the products in serum, the cellular immune response requires whole blood that needs timely processing to obtain leukocytes that can then be probed for cellular immune responses. Additionally, patients receiving such therapies have limited blood volumes due to plasmapheresis and other immune suppressive pre-treatments as well as pediatric age groups. Hence, to overcome such sample collection and processing challenges, alternative low blood volumes may need to be evaluated. This work evaluates the use of lyophilized peptides in blood harvest tubes and their ability to elicit an antigen specific (COVID peptides) responses. The responses were compared to the conventional assays like ELISPOT. Additionally, the peptides were assessed for stability in these tubes. A good correlation of the whole blood derived cytokine assessment was observed with ELISPOT readout. The same principle can be applied to evaluate viral and CART domain specific immune responses.
Learning Objectives:
The audience will be able to learn about a less expensive alternative method to evaluate antigen specific T cell immune response
The participants can learn about the current limitations of existing methods for measuring T cell immune response
The audience will be able to learn that the test platform is versatile as it can be adopted for many other antigens and disease conditions.
The audience will be able to learn that the test can be a valuable tool for large scale population studies
.jpg "Sivasankar Baalasubramanian, PhD (he/him/his) photo")