Smart control of culture process for NK cell autologous therapy

Advanced immune cell therapy, such as natural killer cell treatment for cancer, originate from cells isolated from the patient blood.

After in vitro culture generating activated and expanded natural killer cells, the cells are transfused to the patient where there are very efficient to fight against cancer cells, e.g. multiple myeloma.

An issue of the manufacturing procedure in this treatment, is the variability of the starting material, the patient cells, which has a high impact on the cell expansion.

This implies that their culture requires individual and personalized attention, and a proper production process is determinant for the quality of the cells given back to the patients.

In this project, personalized cell expansion procedure to ensure robust and reproducible manufacturing of immune cell therapy products is created.

In particular, new understanding and new model-based approaches for integrating individual profiling of the cells are investigated to address this variability.

For this, the cells are characterised and biomarkers identified to capture typical variations, and model-based control for personalized cell expansion is obtained.The technologies and approaches will be adoptable for other cells systems, where the variation of the starting material is an issue.

From this individual tailoring, more effective treatments will be generated even for allogenic cell therapy based on donor material, where variability of the starting cells can impact the product quality.