Development of Non-Biohazardous p24 Antigen Expressing Synthetic Cells as a Reference Control Alternative to HIV+ Donor Samples
PROJECT OVERVIEW
A Fortune 100 pharmaceutical company came to Slingshot Biosciences, Inc. to explore assay strategies for detecting the reduction in HIV reservoir proviruses in patients living with HIV. They were interested in using HIV-1 p24 expression as a marker for translation-competent HIV-infected cells1. Flow cytometry provides a practical and rapid way to monitor anti-retroviral therapy and better predict disease progression compared to laborious methods such as PCR2.
However, the traditional approach of using HIV-infected cells as reference controls in flow cytometry studies pres- ents enormous bio-safety risks to lab personnel, which results in the need for costly bio-safety equipment and segregated lab space. Moreover, patient donor blood can introduce variability and limit consistency in results when used as a reference control, as no patient sample will be exactly the same. Low or variable expression of p24 antigen in patient samples also poses an additional challenge to reproducible results.
To address these challenges, Slingshot Biosciences partnered with the pharmaceutical company to engineer a p24-expressing, non-infectious synthetic T-cell mimic that could safely, reproducibly, and conveniently be used as a cellular reference control for detecting p24 antigen-positive T-cells in HIV+ patients.
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