Over the last couple of years, it has become apparent that affinity-tuned CAR T cells display enhanced expansion and prolonged persistence in patients and that this strategy can result in increased clinical success.

 

Although affinity screening and measurements for binding kinetics will lead to the identification of a range of affinity-tuned CARs, they will not assist in choosing the optimal candidate. For this reason, a series of standard in vitro assays need to be performed that often requires long-term co-cultures or the use of radioactive isotopes. Besides these drawbacks, such assays do not always accurately predict the most potent candidate(s) for further development for clinical use. In this webinar, we demonstrate that measuring cellular avidity, i.e., overall binding strength between effector and target cell, using z-Movi® Cell Avidity Analyzer, could aid in quickly identifying optimal functioning CARs.

 

In the first part of the webinar, Dr. Reijmers, Principal Scientist at LUMICKS, will introduce the z-Movi: a novel and unique instrument for accurate and direct measurement of cell–cell interaction strength using acoustic forces. This new technology provides you with predictive, reproducible, and fast high-throughput results at a single-cell level. He will deep-dive into the principle of the z-Movi and will indicate how the workflow enables the determination of precise cell avidity measurements from hundreds of cells simultaneously.

 

In the second part of the webinar Dr. Maher, CSO at Leucid Bio and group leader of the “CAR Mechanics” research group within King’s College London, will focus on a clinical trial of CAR-T immunotherapy in patients with head and neck cancer using a panErbB-targeted second generation CAR known as T4 immunotherapy. An update on this trial will be provided. He will also describe his efforts to develop a next generation CAR platform known as a parallel (p)CAR in which optimized co-stimulation is delivered by a paired second generation CAR and chimeric co-stimulatory receptor. He will explain how they selected targeting moieties for this approach using the LUMICKS z-Movi technology in order to address the importance of relative binding affinity in the design of optimized pCAR. He will also provide a range of exemplifications of this technology involving distinct targets, binding modules, co-stimulatory modules, and tumor models.