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

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 measured UCB NK cell ex vivo fold expansion, phenotype and cytotoxic potential using a basic expansion system. We then used these results to identify characteristics related to superior performance, enabling the optimization, selection and processing of CBUs for the manufacture of NK cells as therapies at a larger scale. Results Our results revealed that despite wide inter-donor variability in performance between CBUs, a priori selection could be used to identify units likely to show high expansion and/or cytotoxicity. We observed that decreased time between UCB collection and CD3 - UCB mononuclear cell (CBMC) isolation was associated with significantly higher NK fold expansion (n=13; p