BioTek and ACEA Acquisitions Expand Agilent's Immunotherapy Tool Box
A promising research area
Agilent has embarked on a journey to help researchers in their quest to advance and develop new immunotherapies to aid in the fight against cancer. Immunotherapy is a rapidly growing area of research that aims to develop therapies to harness and support the body's own immune system in fighting the disease.
Immunotherapies come in various forms, but the newly emerging field of cell-based therapies represents a particularly exciting prospect for researchers. These therapies involve collecting immune cells, engineering them to recognize and kill cancer cells, manufacturing and quality controlling these immune cells, and then re-introducing them.
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Requiring a new approach
To develop these new and exciting cell-based immunotherapies, scientists need tools that enable them to study cellular behavior and function. This is because understanding how cells behave and function is critical to understanding how disease cells grow, function and survive differently from the normal cells. It also gives researchers an insight into how diseases advance and how the pathological cells respond to therapies. With this understanding, researchers can then follow a more targeted approach to therapeutic discovery and ultimately produce more effective therapeutics.
Generating these insights using traditional cell analysis methods, which are based on arbitrary endpoint analysis, can be difficult. This is because these analyses provide a snapshot of cellular behavior at a single point in time, instead of allowing researchers to understand how these dynamic processes change over time.
Complementary cell-analysis tools from Agilent, ACEA, and BioTek
To truly gain the insights into cellular behavior and function, scientists need to study live cells, in real time, in physiologically relevant environments. Under these conditions, their experiments will better reflect how cells might behave and respond in the body. Agilent's expanding cell analysis portfolio provides researchers with the tools that they need to perform these studies.
Agilent Seahorse XF Analyzers enable researchers to investigate metabolism in live cells, in real time, producing time-resolved functional data. The acquisition of ACEA Biosciences Inc., brings two innovative, highly differentiated platforms: the NovoCyte flow cytometer, a high performance, customizable benchtop cytometer portfolio with advanced capabilities and flexibilities and the xCELLigence system - a unique biosensor-impedance based technology platform that enables researchers to monitor cell growth, cell function, and cellular responses to various treatments, in real time without using labels.
Agilent has also recently announced the further expansion of its cell analysis portfolio, with the acquisition of BioTek. BioTek is a recognized leader and innovator of multimode microplate readers, washers, dispensers and increasingly imaging solutions. This addition will enable researchers to harness more of the host's immune repertoire to fight disease.
By integrating the BioTek offering, Agilent will be able to deliver highly differentiated workflows that will enable customers to obtain deeper, more reliable insights from live cell samples, across a variety of cell analysis workflows, with higher throughput than other solutions available.
These highly complementary portfolios provide researchers with the tools they need to truly understand cellular behavior, particularly in the growing fields of immunotherapy research, discovery, and development. Importantly, these new Agilent tools enable researchers to measure both immune cell activation and function and to monitor immune-cell killing of cancer cells for quantifying the functional potency.
With Agilent's expanding range of cell analysis solutions, researchers can be sure to find the tools they need to address their fundamental questions about cellular function and behavior.
Find out more:
- Next Generation Solutions for Immune and CAR T Cell Therapy
- Agilent immunotherapy research solutions
- ACEA Biosciences, Inc. A part of Agilent
- BioTek
For Research Use Only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures.