The Challenges
Why we need single cell profiling.
Immune cells are very diverse. How to functionally identify and sort out antigen-specific T/B cells from the 100 billion T/B cells in the body with a diversity of a billion has been a known bottleneck. It’s equivalent to searching for a needle in a haystack. Over the past decade, many efforts have been made to figure out how to profile such a diverse population and especially pick out the very rare ones that are effective targets for cancer immunotherapy. However, few technologies developed can functionally profile the immune cells and even fewer can do this at the single-cell level, and almost no one can do this at such an ultrahigh throughput that enables target identification and selection.
Ultrahigh Throughput Functional Pairing
Our Solution
At ShennonBio, we’ve developed a proprietary single cell platform that functionally profiles individual immune cells at ultrahigh throughput to resolve this bottleneck. We can process millions of cells within an hour, functionally characterize each one of them and pull out the rare targets within a day. This allows us to capitalize on the diversity of the immune repertoire and identify immune cells that can target almost any disease. The potential of the platform is limitless. Our first focus is to profile and identify T cells and T cell receptors to develop more effective immunotherapies for solid tumors.
The Process
STEP 1
T cell profiling
We use our platform to profile millions of T cells against our pool of antigens, and select out the antigen specific T cells corresponding to each antigen.
STEP 2
TCR Discovery and Validation
We sequence the selected T cells to uncover the TCRs and map them to the antigens. We then validate the TCRs by testing their specificity and functionality rigorously both in vitro and in vivo.
STEP 3
T Cell Engagers and TCR-T Therapy
We work with our clinical partners and pharma partners to run clinical trials and to develop the therapies to treat patients.