Cryostress: optimisation of the cryopreservation procedure of therapeutic cells

Cell therapy is any form of treatment in which body cells are used to cure or support the patient. The therapeutic success of cell therapy depends on vulnerable biological material: cells. In cell therapy, getting enough therapeutic and live cells on site effectively and reproducibly is essential.

To bridge the period between growing up the therapeutic cells and administering them, the cells are frozen and stored in liquid nitrogen. After thawing, the viability of the therapeutic cells is determined so that a minimum dose of live cells is always injected with each injection. The large number of cells that do not survive the freeze-thaw procedure underwent an expensive and labour-intensive culture procedure in vain.

The basic freezing protocols in cell therapy contrast with the complexity of cryopreservation science. Indeed, successful cryopreservation depends on several variables: the choice of cryoprotectant, the concentration of the cryoprotectant, the medium in which the cryoprotectant is diluted, the freezing rate and cell density.

The aim of this research is to bridge the gap between complex cryopreservation science and basic freezing protocols in cell therapy. We want to lower the threshold for cell therapy scientists to consider and test alternative freezing protocols. Essential to this is that the investment of time and resources is predictable and preferably as small as possible, so that they can keep the main focus on the cell therapy itself.

As a research approach, we use Design-of-Experiments, which statistically selects the points to be tested in a multidimensional space to estimate the importance of different variables with a relatively small dataset, reveal interactions between key variables and determine the optimal freezing conditions.

The intended output is a well-defined and ready-to-use DoE procedure to identify conditions for a freezing protocol with maximum viability and minimum stress with a minimal and fixed number of measurements for a specific (therapeutic) cell line.

Researchers

• katrien.pieters@kdg.be
• jinthe.vanloenhout@kdg.be