AIM Platform: A Novel Nano Artificial Antigen-Presenting Cell-Based Clinical System Designed to Consistently Produce...

Over the last decade, tremendous progress has been made in the field of adoptive cell therapy. The two prevailing modalities include endogenous non-engineered approaches and genetically engineered T-cell approaches. Endogenous non-engineered approaches include dendritic cell-based systems and tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL) that are used to produce multi-antigen-specific T-cell products. Genetically engineered approaches, such as T-cell receptor engineered cells and chimeric antigen receptor T cells are used to produce single antigen-specific T-cell products. It is noted by the authors that there are alternative methods to sort for antigen-specific T cells such as peptide multimer sorting or cytokine secretion assay-based sorting, both of which are potentially challenging for broad development and commercialization. In this review, we are focusing on a novel nanoparticle technology that generates a non-engineered product from the endogenous T-cell repertoire. The most common approaches for ex vivo activation and expansion of endogenous, non-genetically engineered cell therapy products rely on dendritic cell-based systems or IL-2 expanded TIL. Hurdles remain in developing efficient, consistent, controlled processes; thus, these processes still have limited access to broad patient populations. Here, we describe a novel approach to produce cellular therapies at clinical scale, using proprietary nanoparticles combined with a proprietary manufacturing process to enrich and expand antigen-specific CD8⁺ T-cell products with consistent purity, identity, and composition required for effective and durable anti-tumor response.