Webinar "Targeting Glioblastoma: Assessing the potency of T cells to kill cancer"
Glioblastoma is the most common type of primary brain tumor in adults, accounting for 17% of all brain tumors. A particularly aggressive form of brain cancer, glioblastoma has no effective treatments and a prognosis of only 12–15 months. Consequently, new therapeutic approaches are urgently needed to improve patient outcomes. Cancer immunotherapy focuses on harnessing the innate powers of the immune system to fight cancer. T cells play a critical role in the body’s adaptive immune response, by seeking out and destroying compromised cells. As a result, genetically engineered T cells have considerable promise as a cancer therapy due to their high specificity and innate cytotoxicity. One such therapy is chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy, a form of targeted immunotherapy that involves the modification of a patient’s own T cells to target specific antigens expressed on the tumor cell surface. In this webinar, Dr. Lohitash Karumbaiah and Megan Logan at the University of Georgia, use label-free impedance measurements to assess in real-time, the targeting potency of activated human T cells on human U87MG glioma cell monolayers. These findings demonstrate the value of using an in vitro impedance-based assay to access therapeutic CAR T-cell potency against glioblastoma.