NEW YORK (360Dx) – ACEA Biosciences and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center today announced a collaboration to evaluate whether patient-specific ex vivo cancer immunotherapy assays can predict in vivo efficacy.
The collaborators will assess the assay, which uses cancer patient's malignant pleural effusions. They also will evaluate ACEA's xCelligence Real-Time Cell Analysis platform to monitor destruction of cancer cells by patients' own genetically modified CAR T cells.
ACEA's instrument can monitor this cancer-killing process in real-time without the use of labels. According to the collaborators, this allows the evaluation of CAR T cell potency "under conditions that are of maximal physiological relevance."
Financial and other terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Prasad Adusumilli, who lab will head the project at MSKCC, said the time resolution of ACEA's technology "will be an important feature of this ex vivo assay with malignant pleural effusions to understand both the efficacy and the resistance of the patient's tumor cells to CAR T cell treatment."