Berkeley Lights, Inc. and the Jaime Leandro Foundation for Therapeutic Cancer Vaccines announced the discovery, functional characterization, and recovery of a patient-derived T cell receptor sequence against a cancer neoantigen. Together, Berkeley Lights and JLF were able to measure and identify T cells that were reactive against peptides used in a cancer vaccine that was administered to a patient to successfully stimulate an immune response against their advanced-stage pancreatic cancer leading to complete remission. The patient was treated under the supervision of physicians at Washington University in St.

Louis. The unprecedented speed of these results relied on the Berkeley Lights Beacon(R) system. Applying the cell therapy development workflow, thousands of phenotypic measurements of single T cells were performed within one week.

These measurements identified T cells that were cytotoxic and capable of secreting cytokines in response to antigen encounter, which were therefore predicted to be functional and subsequently sequenced at a single cell level. Cloning these T cell receptor sequences and expressing them in naïve T cells enabled functional validation against an antigen of interest. This function-first measurement capability of the Berkeley Lights platform is a significant differentiator compared to frequency-based assessments of TCRs which result in functional validation bottlenecks, adding to a growing number of highly differentiated service offerings at Berkeley Lights.