Cancer remains one of the most important healthcare challenges of the coming decades. Statistics from 2018 show there were 18.1 million new cases worldwide and 9.5 million cancer-related deaths. Breakthrough discoveries have led to the development of highly promising immune therapies which use the patients own immune system to fight the cancer. This can be done, for example, by treating with compounds which release the breaks on the immune system, by treatment with specifically tailored immune cells or by developing special linkers that link the patient’s immune cells to the target tumor cells.
Biotech and pharmaceutical companies are investing billions in the development of new immune therapies and there is a tremendous need for improved ways to filter out those that work from those that do not. At the same time university researchers keep developing new ways to leverage the immune system to improve human lives.
Current methods for finding the best immune cells and for testing whether a change is beneficial or not are often slow or lead to the wrong predictions when compared to clinical outcomes. LUMICKS has developed technology to analyze and separate cells based on binding strength. This Horizon 2020 Grant has contributed to the development of the z-Movi® cell avidity analyser by LUMICKS. The z-Movi® is a unique instrument that directly measures the avidity between immune cells and their targets, enabling biotech, Pharma companies and academics to identify the most potent cells or immunotherapeutic compounds.
