Autolus
University College London

Rolling out cell therapies with in-process automated testing

The future of cancer treatment is personalised medicine, developing highly specific and tailored treatments to target specific biological factors on tumour cells, increasing the likelihood of successful treatment. Personalised medicine has already seen success in treating certain medical conditions like some cancers, however wider access to a large patient population remains largely unfeasible due to the enormous costs associated with making those highly specific medicines. Manufacturing these personalised drugs alone requires multiple complex steps, carried out manually by highly skilled scientists, with advanced analysis driving the process.

Aleksandra is investigating how those complex analyses can be automated by developing a highly specialised microfluidic device that will be able to analyse samples in specific and efficient manner. This will have a positive impact on product quality and ultimately patient safety. The use of microfluidics to do this type of analysis is a high-throughput solution that can be done much faster than previous methods. It functions like a “lab-on-a-chip”, by scaling down the analysis performed currently on large complex machines into a small microchip-like solution.

The outcome of this “lab-on-a-chip” solution is faster and cheaper analysis of manufactured therapies and therefore a faster and cheaper way to produce effective treatments which will be delivered to patients in the clinic.

Biography
Aleksandra graduated from University College London with a Master’s degree in Biochemical Engineering 2018, after having completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Sheffield. Since then she has worked at Autolus Limited, as a Senior Process Engineer, a Supply Chain Scheduler and a Production Scientist.