BookR: School of Health Core Facilities Booking

Genetically engineering human immune cells has been shown to be an effective approach for developing novel cellular therapies to treat a wide range of diseases. To expand the scope of these cellular therapies while solving persistent challenges, extensive research and development is still required. Here we use a digital microfluidic enabled electroporation system (referred to as triDrop) specifically designed to mitigate harm during electroporation procedures and compare against two state-of-the-art commercially available systems for the engineering of primary human T cells. We describe the ability to use triDrop for highly efficient transfection with minimal reagent consumption while preserving a healthy transcriptomic profile. Finally, we show for the first time the ability to use a digital microfluidic platform for the miniaturized production of Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T cell therapies demonstrating how this novel system can lead to a 2-fold improvement in immunotherapeutic functionality compared to gold standard methods while providing up to a 20-fold reduction in cost. These results highlight the potential power of this system for automated, rapid, and affordable next-generation cell therapy R& D.