Microfluidics for Precision Cell Therapies

Description:
Adoptive cell therapy (ACT) is a type of immunotherapy that involves the processing of blood from a donor to isolate immune cells (e.g. T cells) for genetic manipulation followed by reinfusion of the cells into patients. Specifically for CAR T cell therapy, genetic coding material (e.g. DNA, mRNA) is inserted into the T cells to express chimeric antigen receptors to target biomarkers of cancer cells and trigger an activated immune response towards the tumor of interest. This process that starts from blood drawn from one person and ends with specialized engineered cells delivered to the same patient includes multiple tedious and costly steps, and can require a long time that the patient may not have. Microfluidics techniques are being developed that can address all steps of this cell manufacturing process, including cell harvesting, cell isolation, cell activation and expansion, and cell transfection. In this talk I will introduce microfluidic platforms in my lab, one is the lateral cavity acoustic transducer (LCAT) and the other is droplet microfluidics. LCAT was used for processing blood samples, isolating T cells, transfecting T cells, and finally expanding T cells to scale up for treatment. Based on LCAT, we developed the acoustic electric shear orbiting poration (AESOP) device to uniformly deliver genetic cargo dosage into a large population of cells simultaneously. Based on droplet microfluidics we constructed a single cell artificial antigen presenting cells (aAPCs) for T cell activation. By trapping single cells in microfluidic compartments, we are able to study the cell morphology and cell-cell communications to further understand immune cell activation and immune cell synapses.

Speaker: Abraham Lee - University of California, Irvine
Abraham (Abe) P. Lee is Professor in BME and MAE at UC Irvine (UCI). He directs the CADMIM Center focusing on integrated microfluidics. Dr. Lee was Editor-in-Chief for Lab on a Chip (2017 to 2020). Prior to UCI, he was program manager at DARPA and group leader at LLNL. Dr. Lee pioneered research in microfluidics, and currently focuses on biomedical applications such as liquid biopsy, microphysiological systems, cell engineering, and immunotherapy. His research has contributed to the founding of several start-up companies. He has 55 issued US patents and over 130 journals articles. Dr. Lee was awarded the 2009 Pioneers of Miniaturization Prize and is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), the American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASME), the International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering, and the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES).