Phasefocus Livecyte T-Cell Killing Assay tracks cancer cells and quantifies T-cell interactions

What is the problem we are solving?

T cell killing assays are primarily used to investigate the efficacy of engineered T cells in killing target cancers. Their effectiveness can be broken down to two main aspects: T cell binding (driven by TCR or CAR-T affinity and cell avidity) — how readily they find and bind to target cells; and T cell cytotoxicity — how many targets are actually killed. Whilst the latter may be readily measured, other contributors may have a significant influence on overall killing. For instance, the overall effector-target-dynamics, and how many interactions it takes to kill.

Most T-cell therapies fail in in vivo models and in clinical studies and therefore there is a need to produce an in vitro model to test T cell therapies that is robust and reliable. More information on the dynamics of cell killing interactions is needed to help understand the problem. To gain meaningful insight to these behaviours, a target cell’s historic interactions with effector cells must be reliably quantified. This requires the accurate segmentation and tracking of target cells throughout an experiment.

Why is that a problem?

Most solutions on the market focus on population-level analysis such as quantifying total apoptotic material, or average distances between target and effector cells. They don’t quantify the effector-target cell interactions on a single-cell level, which means they offer limited direct insight into T cell efficacy.

Researchers can manually track and analyse T cell interactions with target cells to quantify them by hand, however this is a subjective and extremely time-consuming process prone to error.

How does Livecyte solve this?

Livecyte uses advanced segmentation and tracking algorithms to automatically segment effector T cells and target cells. In addition, Livecyte can accurately track target cells over time to quantify effector-target interactions from the start of the experiment building up a unique interaction profile until target cell death.

Livecyte automatically compiles metrics based on these killing interaction profiles into its Dashboard view, providing a wealth of information summarising T cell cytotoxicity and target cell recognition, in addition to Livecyte’s standard phenotypic data. This enables Livecyte to specifically quantify T cell-target cell interactions and behaviour independently from cytotoxicity, yielding greater depth of insight into how T cells find and kill their targets.

Contact us to learn more about the Livecyte’s capabilities or to request a guided demo.

ATA Scientific Pty Ltd | Ph: +61 2 9541 3500 | enquiries@atascientific.com.au | www.atascientific.com.au