Q&A Report: How to Optimize Your T Cell Therapy Workflow—Without the Use of Serum or Feeder Cells

The development of safe and efficacious T cell therapies requires a wide range of reliable tools and technologies. To avoid costly delays and ensure a smoother transition from bench to bedside, scientists should use standardized reagents for their T cell cultures. In this talk, Dr. Dominika Nackiewicz introduces how STEMCELL Technologies can help optimize your T cell cultures—with robust, high-performance products and expert support. You will learn how to generate high yields of functional T cells for cell therapy manufacturing using the new GMP ImmunoCult™ medium and activators. She also discusses efficient gene editing strategies using the new CellPore™ Transfection System and solutions for T cell generation from pluripotent stem cells or hematopoietic progenitors.

In this Q&A report, you can view answers to questions asked by the audience. Answers have been edited for length and/or clarity.

Jessie Yu

We designed the activator and medium to be optimized to work together, so we would of course recommend testing them together first. However, we do understand that sometimes you have to run reagents with other reagents. Internally, we have done some studies in this regard, but please reach out to our Sales team for additional information for a case-by-case discussion.

Tim Le Fevre

Serum itself is a very complex biological mixture, likely containing a lot of different unknown and advantageous factors, and this means you’re going to have to do a lot of lot-to-lot variability screening to find a serum that will work well for your application. This variability also makes it much more difficult to have reproducible findings in your work. Feeders, at the same time, add a bit more complexity to your culture. They need to be maintained separately and taken care of, and this will add further regulatory hurdles if you’re trying to use a system that has feeders involved in it. So, avoiding all these things is the main benefit of having a serum- and feeder-free medium, and we certainly recommend that.

Jessie Yu

That’s a great question! With the time constraints, we could only introduce the results we generated with CD3/CD28/CD2 T cell activator. However,, we have  tested both of them internally. They both support activation and expansion of T cells. Usually, the CD3/CD28 activator is gentler than the CD3/CD28/CD2 activator. With CD3/CD28, you may see a different activation dynamic and also T cell growth pattern. Also, you may see a different CD4/CD8 ratio after expansion, as those are our large datasets. Please contact our Sales team for more information. We would love to share that with you.

Jessie Yu

For the primary T cell expansion question, as Dominika mentioned, there are many parameters that can influence your final product, especially its CD4 and CD8 ratio, such as the choice of activator and medium, the culture vessels, and your selected donors and patients. In general, we find that CD3/CD28/CD2 activators tend to maintain the CD4/CD8 ratio in the starting population, whereas CD3/CD28 activators tend to selectively favor CD8 cell population expansion. So again, just reach out to us and we can provide you with more details.