The University of British Columbia

Purpose

The approval of chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapies has been a major breakthrough for patients with relapsed or refractory blood cancers. However, CAR-T cells are highly complex, live cell therapies, and it has proven difficult to predict CAR-T cell potency. Great improvements in laser and detector technologies have led to an explosive growth in biomedical applications of Raman spectroscopy (RS), including leading contributions by this group. RS measures the macromolecular changes in T cells that are phenotypical of their activation state and other changes. The objective of this project is to contribute to the NRC search for potency biomarkers, based on the RS analysis of CLIC-01 patient cell samples taken prior to infusion. This contributes a novel and orthogonal analytical dimension to the overall NRC search for biomarkers that predict the efficacy of the treatment for each patient, and thereby when costly CAR-T cell treatments should be performed