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Researchers at the Harvard Wyss Institute have developed a Biomaterial Scaffold that mimics the actions of antigen-presenting Cells (APCs) in stimulating T Cell growth and survival. The Scaffold allowed the researchers to significantly expand T Cell numbers in a dish, compared with existing Culture methods, and could bring T Cell therapies, such as anti-cancer treatments, closer to clinical reality.Anti-cancer T Cell therapies involve culturing and modifying patient-specific T Cells in a dish before administering them to a cancer patient, where they can attack and kill cancer cells. A major challenge with this technique lies in achieving sufficient T Cell growth and survival in vitro*to obtain a sufficient dose of T cells. At present, it can take weeks of expensive Culture time to grow enough cells. Researchers at the Harvard Wyss Institute took inspiration from another Immune Cell type, the APC, which stimulates T Cells to grow and survive during an Immune response. The researchers designed a Biomaterial Scaffold that provides pro-survival and pro-growth biological cues to T cells, just like an APC in the body. T Cells isolated from donors can access and move through an antigen-presenting cell-mimetic Scaffold to receive cues and multiply. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard UniversityThe research team used mesoporous silica rods to build their scaffold. They loaded the rods with Interleukin-2, a protein produced by APCs that can enhance T Cell survival, and coated them using a lipid layer, to mimic the APC Cell membrane. The team then incorporated antibodies to stimulate the T Cells into the Scaffold lipid “membrane”. “Our approach closely mimics how APCs present their stimulating cues to primary T Cells on their outer membrane and how they release soluble factors that enhance the survival of the T cells,” said David Mooney, a researcher who led the study. “As a result, we achieve much faster and greater expansion. By varying the compositions of lipids, cues, and diffusible factors in the scaffolds, we engineered a very versatile and flexible platform that can be used to amplify specific T Cell populations from blood samples.” Using the scaffolds, the researchers were able to expand T Cells from mice and humans much faster than existing Culture techniques, and they confirmed that the expanded Cells have clinical potential in a mouse lymphoma model. Top image:*The left pane shows a scanning electron micrograph (SEM) of a basic Scaffold made of many tiny mesoporous silica rods (MSRs) before they are coated with a thin supported lipid bilayer (SLB) with the incorporated T cell-stimulating cues. In the right SEM image, T Cells (in blue) bind to a section of a completed antigen-presenting cell-mimetic Scaffold (in brown), where they are instructed to multiply and are kept alive for future use in T Cell therapies. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University Study in Nature Biotechnology: Scaffolds that mimic antigen-presenting cells enable ex vivo expansion of primary T cells… Via: Harvard Wyss Institute… ??????? ??????: Biomaterial Scaffold to Culture T Cells for Immune Cell Therapy || ??????: rss || ??????: اسم منتداك
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