Blog | HemaCare

You wanted cell isolation – we delivered!

In 2021, the word isolation tends to have garnered a negative connotation. However, when a cell biologist thinks of isolation, specifically cell isolation, they think of it as a wonderful thing.

After all, isolated cells are a sought-after starting material that allows scientists to dive deeper into their research and accelerate their studies. At HemaCare, we heard your requests and can now deliver isolated immune cells from full leukopak collections to your doorstep!

A recent independent publication cites using HemaCare leukopaks for their evaluation of a CAR T cell therapy’s antitumor potency.

As the CAR T cell therapy field continues to grow, developers seek to refine techniques that will improve both the safety and efficacy of this promising cancer immunotherapy strategy. Scientists at Juno Therapeutics (Celgene) have been working to improve the potency of a CD19-targeted CAR T therapeutic currently in phase 1 and 2 clinical trials.

The product your lab chooses to fulfill their research needs largely depends on the stage of development. Are you conducting early drug discovery research involving several different candidates? Perhaps your company is involved in translational research, considering a lead candidate for clinical studies? What is your research budget? Choosing the right starting material for a specific project is a critical decision, but one that can sometimes be daunting.

A study out of Research Triangle Park, North Carolina ^[1] cites using HemaCare leukopaks as the starting material for new research on allogeneic CAR T cells.  

As most people know, the cancer fighting technique known as CAR T cell therapy has been getting a lot of attention these days, due to some remarkably positive clinical trial results. Two different versions of CAR T therapy have now earned FDA approval, so it seems that this type of therapy will inevitably be expanded to meet the needs of a considerably wider patient population. There’s a fairly large obstacle standing in the way of this expectation, however. Most clinical trials to date have been based on CAR T cell treatment as an autologous therapy, with the starting materials coming straight from the patients themselves. The problem with this autologous model is that it’s difficult to implement on a commercial scale, due to the limited availability of starting material.

In an independent publication ^[1] researchers at UCLA cited using leukopaks obtained from HemaCare in order to investigate a new gene editing method.

The group is researching strategies to treat genetic blood disorders such as sickle cell anemia. While there has been a great deal of research focused on using CRISPR/Cas9 gene therapy to treat these illnesses ^[2], current strategies for gene editing in hematopoietic stem cells are inefficient, and thus costly.