High-Throughput Immunomodulator Phenotypic Screening Platform

HTiP: High-Throughput Immunomodulator Phenotypic Screening Platform

Application

High Throughput Screening for identifying effective immuno-modulators.

Key Benefits

HT screening platform replicating complex immune medicated response to facilitate discovery of small molecule immunomodulatory agents.
Simplicity and dual readouts of the design enable the screening of large chemical libraries to identify compounds that stimulate or potentiate immune cells to attack cancer cells.

Market Summary

Next-generation immunotherapies are changing the paradigm of cancer that help elicit that body’s natural immune response to kill cancer cells without the harmful side effects of chemotherapies. Still, many patients do not respond to these promising treatments and require complex combinations of other drugs for successful treatment of the disease. There is an emerging effort to develop high-throughput target-based screenings (HTS) to identify small molecules that modulate a specific protein target that may enhance the effectiveness of immunotherapies. Unfortunately, current efforts are limited, and it is challenging to create clinically relevant screening programs. The disclosed technology provides a high-throughput strategy that can identify small molecules that can enhance the treatment of many cancers using phenotypic data.

Technical Summary

The lack of HT (High Throughput) screening platforms that replicate the complexity of the immunosuppressive nature of cancer cells has delayed the discovery of such compounds. Researchers at Emory have developed an HTiP (High-Throughput immunomodulator Phenotypic) screening platform with the purpose of facilitating the identification of effective small molecule immune-modulators from a larger chemical compound library. The screening platform provides a vigorous ex-vivo tumor environment which reflects the immune response network by co-culturing cancer cells with PBMCs (human peripheral blood mononuclear cells). These PBMCS contain a mixture of dendritic cells, monocytes, and lymphocytes.