(540e) Time for a New HOME? Nature Inspired 3D Scaffolds to Improve Cell Culturing Environments for Cancer Immunotherapy

One of the most promising cancer immunotherapy treatments is Adoptive Cell Transfer (ACT). During this treatment, a patient’s own immune cells are genetically engineered to attack the specific tumour cells, then re-infused back into the patient. One of the main challenges with this treatment are the large number of activated T-cells required to proliferate. By applying a systematic Nature-Inspired Solution (NIS) methodology,¹ various bio-inspired 3D T-cell culturing scaffolds have been designed.²

Ongoing research addresses two fundamental questions, with the goal to improve the design, efficiency, and scalability of these 3D culturing environments. Firstly, how the T-cells migrate, proliferate, and activate on the 3D scaffolds and secondly, why. To answer how, a robust computational pipeline has been designed to both build and analyse 12,000 different 3D scaffolds.^3,4 These scaffolds have a wide variety of parameters, such as porosity, surface area and topology. These parameters are under investigation to discern their potential correlations with various biophysical aspects associated with cellular behaviour, notably proliferation and activation rates.

To answer why the T-cells migrate, proliferate, and activate on the 3D scaffolds in the specific manner demonstrated, a cell simulation software has been written that both informs experimental methods and is iteratively refined based on experimental findings. With this knowledge we aim to design improved T-cell culturing environments that can be applied within cancer therapy to make CAR-ACT a more affordable and efficient cancer treatment.

References

• Coppens, M.-O. Nature-Inspired Chemical Engineering for Process Intensification. Rev. Chem. Biomol. Eng. 2021, 12 (1), 187–215.
• Chin, M.H.W.; Reid, B.; Lachina, V.; Acton, S.A.; Coppens, M.-O. Bioinspired 3D microprinted cell scaffolds: integration of graph theory to recapitulate complex network wiring in lymph nodes. J. 2024, 19(1), 2300359.
• Todd, L.; Chin, M.H.W.; Coppens, M.-O. A Computational Pipeline to Optimize 3D Scaffolds for Cancer Immunotherapy. Computer Aided Chemical Engineering 2023, 52, 2705–2710.
• Todd, L.; Chin, M.H.W.; Coppens, M.-O. Two conjectures on 3D Voronoi Structures: A Toolkit with Biomedical Case Studies. MSDE. [submitted for publication]