Umbilical cord blood natural killer cells for adoptive immunotherapy: identifying optimal starting material and processing parameters.

ABSTRACT:

Introduction

Umbilical cord blood (UCB) is an attractive source of natural killer (NK) cells for the development of allogeneic 'off-the-shelf' cancer immunotherapies. This is due to the relatively high proportion of highly proliferative NK cells compared to adult peripheral blood (APB), a low risk of graft-versus-host disease and ease of procurement. However, due to the limited starting volume of UCB and naïve phenotype of isolated cells, ex vivo NK cell expansion and activation is essential to generate clinically relevant doses of cells with potent anti-tumor activity. Furthermore, intrinsic variability in both in vitro and clinical performance of NK cells from different UCB units (CBUs) has been reported.

Methods

To better characterize this variability, we me

SUBMITTER: Kennedy MG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12835214 | biostudies-literature | 2025

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature