Advancing Cell Therapeutics via Mass Spectrometry
The NSF Engineering Research Center for Cell Manufacturing Technologies is a multi-disciplinary and multi-university national center with participating labs in multiple departments at Georgia Tech. The center is focused on making cell-based therapeutic manufacturing more reproduceable, cost effective, and high quality. For many of these therapeutics, there is lacking good quality control measurements that can aid in the manufacturing process to produce a potent and effective product. We participate in collaborations that aim to discover new potency and quality indicators in the developed therapies. Current projects are centered on the immunosuppressive potency and senescence of mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs). These projects utilize ultra-high performance liquid chromatography, ion mobility, imaging mass spectrometry, and high-resolution mass spectrometry to investigate chemical signaling associated with immunosuppression and identify related potency markers, and investigate metabolites associated with senescence. These projects also use machine learning and AI tools to identify chemical markers in very large metabolomics/lipidomics datasets.
References
(1) Nikitina, A.; Huang, D.; Li, L.; Peterman, N.; Cleavenger, S. E.; Fernández, F. M.; Kemp, M. L. A Co-Registration Pipeline for Multimodal MALDI and Confocal Imaging Analysis of Stem Cell Colonies. J. Am. Soc. Mass Spectrom. 2020, 31 (4), 986–989. https://doi.org/10.1021/jasms.9b00094.
(2) Maughon, T. S.; Shen, X.; Huang, D.; Michael, A. O. A.; Shockey, W. A.; Andrews, S. H.; McRae, J. M.; Platt, M. O.; Fernández, F. M.; Edison, A. S.; Stice, S. L.; Marklein, R. A. Metabolomics and Cytokine Profiling of Mesenchymal Stromal Cells Identify Markers Predictive of T-Cell Suppression. Cytotherapy 2022, 24 (2), 137–148. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcyt.2021.08.002.