Monitoring of inflammatory response to cancer immunotherapies.
e15199 Background: Inflammation observed in response to some monoclonal antibody drugs and adaptive T-Cell therapies has become a major issue in cancer immunotherapy. Prognostic monitoring of the inflammatory response requires simultaneous measurement of multiple cytokines at widely divergent concentrations. At present, no analytical method, known to us, can provide large dynamic range (> 6 logs), high sensitivity (< 1pg/ml) and high multiplex in a single test. Methods: The NanoMosaic platform is a cytokine quantification technology powered by silicon nanoneedle biosensors that are densely integrated on a plate and manufactured with CMOS-compatible nanofabrication processes. Each nanoneedle is a label-free biosensor, functionalized with capture antibodies. Each analyte specific sensing area consists a total of ~23k nanoneedles divided into a digital region (~20k nanoneedles) and an analog region (~3k nanoneedles), combined to cover the entire range of inflammatory biomarkers from 0.1pg/ml to 1ug/ml. Results: We demonstrated that the digital nanoneedles achieve the single molecule sensitivity. Therefore, at ultra-low concentrations when antigens that are captured by the nanoneedles follow Poisson statistics, the number of antigens can be quantitated by counting the presence or absence of color changes of individual nanoneedles in a binary fashion. As the protein concentrations increase, the binding events increase accordingly and achieve saturation when all nanoneedles capture more than one protein. Above the digital saturation concentration, an adjacent section of analog nanoneedles perform quantitative analysis based on the level of color change, thus providing a wider dynamic range up to 1ug/ml. Each single analyte area, including both digital and analog sensors, is less than 500um. Therefore, high level multiplex can be achieved by duplicating the detection sensor in a microarray format without loss of sensitivity and dynamic range. Conclusions: The CMOS-compatible NanoMosaic technology provides the cost-effectiveness, sensitivity, dynamic range and multiplexing capacity required to fully integrate patient immune response into therapeutic development and decision making.