Opportunities and challenges for the clinical application of multi-parameter flow cytometry in the era of chimeric antigen receptor-modified T cell immunotherapy / 中华检验医学杂志

ABSTRACT

Chimeric Antigen Receptor-modified(CAR)-T cells have become a new star living cell "drug" in the field of tumor immunotherapy, and five drugs have been available to the public since 2017. The favourable, rapid and efficient interaction of CAR-T therapy from bench to bedside has solved many new scientific problems, which remarkably expands the application field of multi-parameter flow cytometry (MFC). MFC participates the whole process of CAR-T preparation, functional evaluation, quality control, in vivo continuation evaluation, clinical efficacy and toxicity monitoring. New clinical problems caused by high-precision targeted therapy of CAR-T cells pose new challenges in using MFC for accurate tumor immunophenotyping, minimal residual disease monitoring, as well as the demands of comprehensively evaluation of the systematic immune function in different disease stages. In the era of targeted therapy, timely communication between laboratories and clinics is particularly important for obtaining accurate MFC results, which assists clinical individualized diagnosis and treatment.