Diminished responses to mRNA-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in individuals with rheumatoid arthritis on immune-modifying therapies.

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic inflammatory autoimmune disorder that causes debilitating swelling and destruction of the joints. People with RA are treated with drugs that actively suppress one or more parts of their immune system, and these may alter the response to vaccination against SARS-CoV-2. In this study, we analyzed blood samples from a cohort of patients with RA after receiving a 2-dose mRNA COVID-19 vaccine regimen.

High-Throughput Flow Cytometric Method for the Simultaneous Measurement of CAR-T Cell Characterization and Cytotoxicity against Solid Tumor Cell Lines.

High-throughput flow cytometry is an attractive platform for the analysis of adoptive cellular therapies such as chimeric antigen receptor T cell therapy (CAR-T) because it allows for the concurrent measurement of T cell-dependent cellular cytotoxicity (TDCC) and the functional characterization of engineered T cells with respect to percentage of CAR transduction, T cell phenotype, and measurement of T cell function such as activation in a single assay. The use of adherent tumor cell lines can be challenging in these flow-based assays. Here, we present the development of a high-throughput flow-based assay to measure TDCC for a CAR-T construct co-cultured with multiple adherent tumor cell lines.