The clinical success of gene-engineered T cells expressing a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR), as manifested in several clinical trials for the treatment of B cell malignancies, warrants the development of a simple and robust manufacturing procedure capable of reducing to a minimum the challenges associated with its complexity. Conventional protocols comprise many open handling steps, are labor intensive, and are difficult to upscale for large numbers of patients. Furthermore, extensive training of personnel is required to avoid operator variations. An automated current Good Manufacturing Practice-compliant process has therefore been developed for the generation of gene-engineered T cells. Upon installation of the closed, single-use tubing set on the CliniMACS Prodigy™, sterile welding of the starting cell product, and sterile connection of the required reagents, T cells are magnetically enriched, stimulated, transduced using lentiviral vectors, expanded, and formulated. Starting from healthy donor (HD) or lymphoma or melanoma patient material (PM), the robustness and reproducibility of the manufacturing of anti-CD20 specific CAR T cells were verified. Independent of the starting material, operator, or device, the process consistently yielded a therapeutic dose of highly viable CAR T cells. Interestingly, the formulated product obtained with PM was comparable to that of HD with respect to cell composition, phenotype, and function, even though the starting material differed significantly. Potent antitumor reactivity of the produced anti-CD20 CAR T cells was shown in vitro as well as in vivo. In summary, the automated T cell transduction process meets the requirements for clinical manufacturing that the authors intend to use in two separate clinical trials for the treatment of melanoma and B cell lymphoma.

Multiple clinical studies have demonstrated that adaptive immunotherapy using redirected T cells against advanced cancer has led to promising results with improved patient survival. The continuously increasing interest in those advanced gene therapy medicinal products (GTMPs) leads to a manufacturing challenge regarding automation, process robustness, and cell storage. Therefore, this study addresses the proof of principle in clinical-scale selection, stimulation, transduction, and expansion of T cells using the automated closed CliniMACS® Prodigy system. Naïve and central memory T cells from apheresis products were first immunomagnetically enriched using anti-CD62L magnetic beads and further processed freshly (n = 3) or split for cryopreservation and processed after thawing (n = 1). Starting with 0.5 × 108 purified CD3+ T cells, three mock runs and one run including transduction with green fluorescent protein (GFP)-containing vector resulted in a median final cell product of 16 × 108 T cells (32-fold expansion) up to harvesting after 2 weeks. Expression of CD62L was downregulated on T cells after thawing, which led to the decision to purify CD62L+CD3+ T cells freshly with cryopreservation thereafter. Most important in the split product, a very similar expansion curve was reached comparing the overall freshly CD62L selected cells with those after thawing, which could be demonstrated in the T cell subpopulations as well by showing a nearly identical conversion of the CD4/CD8 ratio. In the GFP run, the transduction efficacy was 83%. In-process control also demonstrated sufficient glucose levels during automated feeding and medium removal. The robustness of the process and the constant quality of the final product in a closed and automated system give rise to improve harmonized manufacturing protocols for engineered T cells in future gene therapy studies.

Cell and gene therapies are finally becoming viable patient treatment options, with both T cell-and hematopoietic stem cell (HSC)-based therapies being approved to market in Europe. However, these therapies, which involve the use of viral vector to modify the target cells, are expensive and there is an urgent need to reduce manufacturing costs. One major cost factor is the viral vector production itself, therefore improving the gene modification efficiency could significantly reduce the amount of vector required per patient. This study describes the use of a transduction enhancing peptide, Vectofusin-1 Ò , to improve the transduction efficiency of primary target cells using lentiviral and gammaretroviral vectors (LV and RV) pseudotyped with a variety of envelope proteins. Using Vectofusin-1 in combination with LV pseudotyped with viral glycoproteins derived from baboon endogenous retrovirus, feline endogenous virus (RD114), and measles virus (MV), a strongly improved transduction of HSCs, B cells and T cells, even when cultivated under low stimulation conditions, could be observed. The formation of Vectofusin-1 complexes with MV-LV retargeted to CD20 did not alter the selectivity in mixed cell culture populations, emphasizing the precision of this targeting technology. Functional, ErbB2-specific chimeric antigen receptor-expressing T cells could be generated using a gibbon ape leukemia virus (GALV)-pseudotyped RV. Using a variety of viral vectors and target cells, Vectofusin-1 performed in a comparable manner to the traditionally used surface-bound recombinant fibronectin. As Vectofusin-1 is a soluble peptide, it was possible to easily transfer the T cell transduction method to an automated closed manufacturing platform, where proof of concept studies demonstrated efficient genetic modification of T cells with GALV-RV and RD114-RV and the subsequent expansion of mainly central memory T cells to a clinically relevant dose.

BackgroundThere has been a dramatic increase in T cell receptor (TCR) sequencing spurred, in part, by the widespread adoption of this technology across academic medical centers and by the rapid commercialization of TCR sequencing. While the raw TCR sequencing data has increased, there has been little in the way of approaches to parse the data in a biologically meaningful fashion. The ability to parse this new type of 'big data' quickly and efficiently to understand the T cell repertoire in a structurally relevant manner has the potential to open the way to new discoveries about how the immune system is able to respond to insults such as cancer and infectious diseases.

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