Dalhousie University

Purpose

Chimeric antigen receptor T-cells (CAR-T) are used to treat a variety of cancer. However, unlike well-defined drugs such as chemicals and antibodies, CAR-T are complex, living therapies. Therefore, it is difficult to objectively assess the potency of CAR-T. The overall objective of this project is to determine immunometabolomic biomarkers that can be measured prior to infusion of CAR-T into patients in order to predict the treatment efficacy for each patient. The metabolic profile of all cells is determined by both their genomic makeup as well as their interaction with the environment. Unlike genomic profiles, the metabolomic profile can react rapidly to changes in nutrients, additives and other products added during the production of CAR-T cells from a patient’s own T-cells. Immunometabolomics can be used to rapidly and quantitatively profile hundreds of metabolites. By deploying advanced immunometabolomic techniques to the analysis of CAR-T cells in the context of on-going pre-clinical and clinical trials, we aim to identify robust immunometabolomic biomarkers of CAR-T efficacy.