: How has research in cancer immunotherapy changed in the past decade and how have the technological developments contributed to this evolution?
LM: With the reduction in the cost for sequencing, cancer immunotherapy has changed dramatically in the past decade. The rise of personalized medicine approaches is changing the way immunotherapy treatments are being designed and providing alternative lifesaving treatments to patients.
: What are some of the biggest hurdles/challenges facing researchers in this field and do you think they are being adequately addressed?
LM: There is still a lot to be learned about how the immune system behaves in normal and cancer disease states. As research deepens in this area we will benefit from being able to design even more efficacious immunotherapy treatments with fewer side effects.
: Are there technological solutions that are currently being developed that you are excited about?
LM: We are excited about sequencing and droplet digital PCR. Droplet digital PCR is allowing for the first time the absolute measurement of nucleic acid. This is being applied across multiple stages of development for multiple immunotherapies. For example, droplet digital PCR is enabling accurate viral quantitation, which is key for downstream dosage of cell and gene therapies.
: What are some of the new trends that you are seeing in this field? Will existing technology keep up with those trends?
LM: There is a shift in manufacturing to increase the scale at which personalized cell therapies can be produced, and we are seeing manufacturers rise to this challenge with multiple solutions. This is important to reduce costs. In addition, research into more off-the-shelf versions of cell therapies is making great strides with many key players having these allogeneic cell therapies as part of their pipelines.
: Are there gaps in current technology offerings for cancer immunotherapy? How do they relate to lack of instrumentation, technical know-how, data deluge, and translational issues?
LM: As always lack of suitable tissue and animal-based models is a hindrance. Certainly a lack of trained personnel is a big issue right now.
: As a technology/service provider how are you impacting the progress in this field? What can you do more/better and what will help to make this happen?
LM: As we partner with our customers closely we are fully aware of the challenges they are facing in the development of immunotherapy treatments. Our customers are the drivers to the new technologies or iterations of existing technologies that we develop. Most recently the fully automated QX1 system was launched. This was developed in collaboration with customers to address challenges in their lumbar triggers. For example, the fully automated system allows hands-free droplet digital PCR assays to be performed freeing up technicians for other important tasks. In addition housing all of the parts of the workflow from droplet generation to droplet counting inside a single system allows someone within a QC lab to only need to validate a single system as opposed to multiple systems.
: If you could change one thing to drive progress in this field what would that be?
LM: Reduction in cost for these therapies so that they can be made more widely available.