Successful Transfer of Umbilical Cord Blood CD34 Hematopoietic Stem and Progenitor-derived NK Cells in Older Acute Myeloid Leukemia Patients.

Older acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients have a poor prognosis; therefore, novel therapies are needed. Allogeneic natural killer (NK) cells have been adoptively transferred with promising clinical results. Here, we report the first-in-human study exploiting a unique scalable NK-cell product generated from CD34 hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPC) from partially HLA-matched umbilical cord blood units.

Clinical-grade generation of active NK cells from cord blood hematopoietic progenitor cells for immunotherapy using a closed-system culture process.

Natural killer (NK) cell-based adoptive immunotherapy is a promising treatment approach for many cancers. However, development of protocols that provide large numbers of functional NK cells produced under GMP conditions are required to facilitate clinical studies. In this study, we translated our cytokine-based culture protocol for ex vivo expansion of NK cells from umbilical cord blood (UCB) hematopoietic stem cells into a fully closed, large-scale, cell culture bioprocess.