Immunotherapy is a new way to treat cancer and other diseases. Instead of trying to kill cancer cells, immunotherapy helps your immune system recognize them as foreign invaders and fight them directly. It’s an exciting area of research because it has the potential to help people live longer, healthier lives.
At Lovinium bio lab, we want to help you take advantage of this exciting new technology. When you use our iPSC-derived T cells, natural killer cells (NK) cells, hematopoietic progenitor cells (HPCs) CD34+, dendritic cells, and others, you can:
-Evaluate the efficacy of immunotherapies in preclinical studies
-Develop co-culture models for testing drugs and understanding immune cell activation and function
-Generate high-quality lineage-committed immune cells: CD8+ and CD4+ T cells, CD34+ HPCs, NK cells, dendritic cells, monocytes
Natural Killer (NK) cell
Lovinium-NK cell therapy is an innovative new cancer treatment based on clinically proven, non-Toxic NK cell therapy. NK cells attack cancer cells by inducing a coordinated set of cytotoxic responses in target tumor-associated tumor cells, neutrophils, and monocytes. Lovinium uses our immunobiological approach to treat patients with fibrotic diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and bone-on-bone (osteoarthritic) conditions that impact their quality of life.
NK cell therapy has the potential to 1) target multiple pathogenic antigens with measurably more efficient cytotoxicity, 2) be better controlled to reduce the risk of cytokine storms, and 3) be produced from a variety of sources without relying on patient-specific immune cells.
Lovinium’s proprietary NK cell therapy platform is designed to maximize the therapeutic effect of allogeneic NK cells through robust expansion enhanced targeting and extended persistence of these potent immune cells to unleash a powerful and sustained anti-cancer immune-mediated attack.
Lovinium provides a solution to address the unmet needs of cancer patients. The company’s proprietary technology is focused on producing a therapy that overcomes the challenges of the naturally-occurring immune response, which include: Engineering enhanced NK cell recognition of their tumor targets, Generating an abundant supply of allogeneic NK cells and Improving their persistence for sustained activity in the body. Their goal is to offer a versatile and robust approach to cancer therapy that is easily combined with other therapies for allogeneic applications to ultimately improve outcomes for patients.
CAR-T
CAR-T treatment, one of the most widely used immunotherapies today, works by increasing the patient’s immune system to fight cancer. Lovinium biotech offers a wide range of cellular and gene therapy services, including T cell Receptor (TCR), CAR-T cell therapy, CAR-macrophage cell therapy (CAR-M), and CAR-NK cell therapy, all of which are backed up by our diverse team and flexible solutions.
CAR T-cell therapy involves the use of CAR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) technology to genetically modify a patient’s immune cells. The CARs are directed against specific antigens in the tumor cells, which can be used to distinguish between normal and abnormal T-cells from patients’ immune systems that could be used to treat cancer by killing cancer cells with the help of their payloads of therapeutic proteins.
CAR-NK
With the remarkable success of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-engineered T (CAR-T) cells for treating hematological malignancies, there is a rapidly growing interest in developing CAR-engineered NK (CAR-NK) cells for cancer therapy. Compared to CAR-T cells, CAR-NK cells could offer some significant advantages, including (1) better safety, such as a lack or minimal cytokine release syndrome and neurotoxicity in autologous setting and graft-versus-host disease in allogeneic setting, (2) multiple mechanisms for activating cytotoxic activity, and (3) high feasibility for ‘off-the-shelf’ manufacturing. CAR-NK cells could be engineered to target diverse antigens, enhance proliferation and persistence in vivo, increase infiltration into solid tumors, overcome resistant tumor microenvironment, and ultimately achieve an effective anti-tumor response. Recent progress in genetic engineering and clinical application of CAR-NK cells, and discuss current challenges and future promise of CAR-NK cells as novel cellular immunotherapy in cancer.
More recently, iPSCs have become an attractive source of CAR-NK cells attributed to their unlimited proliferative capacity. Compared to differentiated NK cells, iPSCs can be more efficiently engineered to stably express a CAR. CAR-engineered iPSCs can be cultured in media containing stem cell factor (SCF), vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), and bone morphogenetic protein 4 (BMP4) to differentiate into hematopoietic progenitor cells, which are then stimulated with IL3, IL-15, IL-7, SCF, and FLT3L in culture medium to differentiate into CAR-NK cells. The resulting CAR-NK cells can be harvested and expanded in the presence of irradiated mIL-21-expressing artificial antigen-presenting cells. In this process, only one single CAR-engineered iPSC cell is sufficient to differentiate into a large number of highly homogeneous CAR-NK cell products for clinical use. However, iPSCs-derived NK cells, similar to UCB NK cells, are usually characterized by an immature phenotype, with lower KIR and CD16 expression and higher NKG2A expression compared to PB NK cells. Nevertheless, iPSC NK cells expressing NK-tailored CAR instead of conventional CAR designed for T cells have demonstrated potent anti-tumor activity in vitro and in vivo, and hence provide a renewable source for an “off-theshelf” CAR-NK cell products.
CAR-M
Macrophages are considered a promising type among immune cells. Macrophages can activate lymphocytes or other immune cells by engulfing cell debris and pathogens and presenting antigens, inducing the immune response to pathogens. In the tumor microenvironment, macrophages are the innate immune cells with the highest infiltration rate and can interact with almost all cellular components in TME, stimulate angiogenesis, increase tumor invasion, and mediate immunosuppression.
Car-macrophage therapy has been developed as an alternative to CAR-T cell therapies for solid tumor treatment due to its advantages such as less toxicity, better antitumor effect, longer persistence of effect, and more favorable side effects. However, there are still many limitations to overcome before CAR-macrophage therapy will be widely used in clinical practice.
Links
