Cryopreserved leukapheresis material can be transferred from controlled rate freezers to ultracold storage at warmer temperatures without affecting downstream CAR-T cell culture performance and in-vitro functionality.

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies are increasingly adopted as a commercially available treatment for hematologic and solid tumor cancers. As CAR-T therapies reach more patients globally, the cryopreservation and banking of patients' leukapheresis materials is becoming imperative to accommodate intra/inter-national shipping logistical delays and provide greater manufacturing flexibility. This study aims to determine the optimal temperature range for transferring cryopreserved leukapheresis materials from two distinct types of controlled rate freezing systems, Liquid Nitrogen (LN2)-based and LN2-free Conduction Cooling-based, to the ultracold LN2 storage freezer (≤-135 °C), and its impact on CAR T-cell production and functionality. Presented findings demonstrate that there is no significant influence on CAR T-cell expansion, differentiation, or downstream in-vitro function when employing a transfer temperature range spanning from -30 °C to -80 °C for the LN2-based controlled rate freezers as well as for conduction cooling controlled rate freezers. Notably, CAR T-cells generated from cryopreserved leukapheresis materials using the conduction cooling controlled rate freezer exhibited suboptimal performance in certain donors at transfer temperatures lower than -60 °C, possibly due to the reduced cooling rate of lower than 1 °C/min and extended dwelling time needed to reach the final temperatures within these systems. This cohort of data suggests that there is a low risk to transfer cryopreserved leukapheresis materials at higher temperatures (between -30 °C and -60 °C) with good functional recovery using either controlled cooling system, and the cryopreserved materials are suitable to use as the starting material for autologous CAR T-cell therapies.

A fine-grained analysis of facial expression processing in high-functioning adults with autism.

It is unclear whether individuals with autism are impaired at recognizing basic facial expressions, and whether, if any impairment exists, it applies to expression processing in general, or to certain expressions, in particular. To evaluate these alternatives, we adopted a fine-grained analysis of facial expression processing in autism. Specifically, we used the 'facial expression megamix' paradigm [Young, A. W., Rowland, D., Calder, A. J, Etcoff, N. L., Seth, A., & Perrett, D. I. (1997). Facial expression megamix: Tests of dimensional and category accounts of emotion recognition Cognition and Emotion, 14, 39-60] in which adults with autism and a typically developing comparison group performed a six alternative forced-choice response to morphs of all possible combinations of the six basic expressions identified by Ekman [Ekman, P. (1972). Universals and cultural differences in facial expressions of emotion. In J. K. Cole (Ed.), Nebraska symposium on motivation: vol. 1971, (pp. 207-283). Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press] (happiness, sadness, disgust, anger, fear and surprise). Clear differences were evident between the two groups, most obviously in the recognition of fear, but also in the recognition of disgust and happiness. A second experiment demonstrated that individuals with autism are able to discriminate between different emotional images and suggests that low-level perceptual difficulties do not underlie the difficulties with emotion recognition.

Configural processing in autism and its relationship to face processing.

Studies of the perceptual performance of individuals with autism have focused, to a large extent, on two domains of visual behavior, one associated with face processing and the other associated with global or holistic processing. Whether autistic individuals differ from neurotypical individuals in these domains is debatable and, moreover, the relationship between the behaviors in these two domains remains unclear. We first compared the face processing ability of 14 adult individuals with autism with that of neurotypical controls and showed that the autistic individuals were slowed in their speed of face discrimination. We then showed that the two groups differed in their ability to derive the global whole in two different tasks, one using hierarchical compound letters and the other using a microgenetic primed matching task with geometric shapes, with the autistic group showing a bias in favor of local information. A significant correlation was also observed between performance on the face task and the configural tasks. We then confirmed the prediction that the ability to derive the global whole is not only critical for faces but also for other objects as well, as the autistic individuals performed more slowly than the control group in discriminating between objects. Taken together, the results suggest that the bias for local processing seen in autistic individuals might have an adverse impact on their ability to process faces and objects.