Two-stage inertial microfluidics enrichment of activated T-cells towards a bead-less chimeric antigen receptor manufacturing protocol
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Date
2026
Authors
Elsemary, M.T.
Maritz, M.F.
Smith, L.E.
Warkiani, M.E.
Thierry, B.
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Medical Oncology, 2026; 43(3):126-1-126-15
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Mona T. Elsemary, Michelle F. Maritz, Louise E. Smith, Majid Ebrahimi Warkiani, Benjamin Thierry
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Abstract
CAR-T cell therapy is leading the way in the field of cancer cell immunotherapies due to its high success rates. However, the manufacturing of CAR-T cells remains complex and expensive. T-cell enrichment from patient apheresis starting material is a key step in the manufacture but cellular impurities interfere with the ex vivo transduction of T-cells and their proliferation. Current enrichment methods including magnetic bead selection suffer from various limitations. We report here a bead-less T-cell enrichment process through a two-stage procedure based on inertial microfluidics. Using apheresis like starting material samples from healthy donors, the dual-stage process showed an efficient 87% (SD ± 6%) enrichment and 80% (SD ± 30%) recovery of T-cells. Validation of the process with ovarian cancer samples resulted in a T-cell purity 70% (SD ± 10%) from a starting purity of 48% (SD ± 6%) at a 64% (SD ± 4%) T-cell recovery. The two-stage inertial microfluidic process was also shown to have no detectable effect on the proliferation of the cells.
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© The Author(s) 2026. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.