iPSC Derived Dendritic cells for Therapeutic Application
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Characterisation and Optimisation of the Manufacture, Storage and Transport of a Novel Source of CD141+ Dendritic Cells for Downstream Use in Cancer Immunotherapy
IRAS ID
300732
Contact name
Timothy J Davies
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
OXvax Ltd
Duration of Study in the UK
3 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
Dendritic cells (DC) play an essential role in all immune responses, whether protecting against infectious diseases or preventing the development of tumours. Their function is to present protein antigens to naïve T cells, thereby inducing their activation and instructing them to destroy appropriate targets. Given the significance of their role, DC have been widely exploited for cancer immunotherapy but clinical trials have proven disappointing since conventional DC differentiated from a patient’s own peripheral blood monocytes (moDC), fail to present tumour antigens to cytotoxic T cells, essential for the eradication of an established tumour. Instead, a rare population of DC, defined by its surface expression of the molecule CD141, is uniquely capable of presenting antigen to cytotoxic T cells but cannot be obtained from patients in sufficient numbers for clinical use. By producing so-called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) from individual patients, we have recently demonstrated the feasibility of differentiating them into unlimited numbers of CD141+ DC thereby making this subset of DC available for clinical applications for the first time.
The objective of this research project is to fully characterise the CD141+ cells from a phenotypic and functional point of view, establish the target quality profile for the cellular product and optimise and 'industrialise' the manufacturing protocol to enable manufacturing under cGMP.
REC name
Wales REC 2
REC reference
21/WA/0222
Date of REC Opinion
21 Jul 2021
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion