September 14-15, 2023
La Jolla, CA, USA
September 14-15, 2023
La Jolla, CA, USA
Micro Innovations Defining the New Frontiers in Liquid Biopsies – Sunitha Nagrath, Ph.D. (University
of Michigan)
Microfluidic technologies were always at the forefront of innovations in liquid biopsies. There were several cornerstone microfluidic technologies that enabled sensitive and yet specific identification of blood-based biomarkers. The confluence of technology advancement and rapid developments in molecular characterization techniques pushed the boundaries of liquid biopsies thus enhancing the clinical utility of blood biopsies. Several such key enabling technologies will be presented. How isolation of circulating tumor cells and tumor derived vesicles using novel microfluidic technologies can enable precision diagnostics will be demonstrated with the example clinical case studies.
High-throughput Time Lapse Imaging for Analysis of Phenotypic Responses of >100,000 Single Clones for
Applications in Drug Screening and Cell Killing Assays – Benjamin Yellen, Ph.D. (Celldom)
The next generation of single cell analysis will involve the measurement of functional properties of living cells, including growth, death, protein secretions, and the interactions between multiple cell types. Similar to transcriptomic measurements, there is a need for measuring high dimensional functional properties of single cells so that the relevant subpopulations can be identified and retrieved for follow-on applications, including cell line development and immune marker discovery. However, existing platforms to date have either hand insufficient scale, low dimensionality and/or are too high cost to be practically implemented for routine biology experiments. In this talk, I will summarize our recent advances in using high dimensional time lapse imaging to measure the functional heterogeneity of living cells at the scale of 100,000 single clones per experiment. I will provide several examples of the applications of our platform in the ability to find rare drug-resistant cells, existing at frequencies of less than 1 in 10,000 in the parental population, as well as in measuring the potency of immune cells that are both effective at secreting cytokines and also in killing cancer cells in a target dependent manner. Ultimately, this platform can be used in the development of better drugs that more effectively suppress resistance, as well as better cell-based therapies that have greater clinical effectiveness.
Analyzing and Isolating the Best T cells in a Micro-plate – Qi Zhao, Ph.D. (Enrich Therapeutics)
We here introduce Enrich TROVO, a versatile and compact cell culture/capture system compatible with traditional cell culture protocols and equipment while facilitating long-term single-cell behavior analysis and isolation. We demonstrated the TROVO application for mapping and isolating high-performing CAR-T cells. The system is designed for culture plates. Both positive and negative capture are allowed, ensuring high cell viability for fragile cells in adherence or suspension.
Digitalizing Therapeutic Discovery – Weian Zhao, Ph.D. (University of California Irvine)
Aureka Biotechnologies is a biotech startup committed to democratizing the pharmaceutical industry to defeat disease, empowered by an integrated therapeutic discovery platform combining high-throughput digital biology and generative AI. We aim to uncover therapeutic design principles and exponentially accelerate the discovery of a wide range of immunotherapeutic modalities including bispecific antibodies, ADCs, and TCR-T. In this presentation, I will showcase our high throughput, combinatorial library and single cell-based functional discovery for bispecific antibodies (BsABs). The technology can be applicable for the discovery of a wide range of bispecific and multispecific modalities including T cell engagers (BiTEs, TCR mimics, soluble TCRs), ADCs, PROTABs, and multi-subunit membrane receptor modulators.