All-in-one processing of heterogeneous human cell grafts for gene and cell therapy

Abstract

Current cell processing technologies for gene and cell therapies are often slow, expensive, labor intensive and are compromised by high cell losses and poor selectivity thus limiting the efficacy and availability of clinical cell therapies. We employ cell-specific on-demand mechanical intracellular impact from laser pulse-activated plasmonic nanobubbles (PNB) to process heterogeneous human cell grafts ex vivo with dual simultaneous functionality, the high cell type specificity, efficacy and processing rate for transfection of target CD3+ cells and elimination of subsets of unwanted CD25+ cells. The developed bulk flow PNB system selectively processed human cells at a rate of up to 100 million cell/minute, providing simultaneous transfection of CD3+ cells with the therapeutic gene (FKBP12(V36)-p30Caspase9) with the efficacy of 77% and viability 95% (versus 12 and 60%, respectively, for standard electroporation) and elimination of CD25+ cells with 99% efficacy. PNB flow technology can unite and replace several methodologies in an all-in-one universal ex vivo simultaneous procedure to precisely and rapidly prepare a cell graft for therapy. PNB’s can process various cell systems including cord blood, stem cells, and bone marrow.