Quantum Nufect™
A proprietary buffer system for effective gene delivery and high cell viability maintenance
Gene-modified cell therapy involves the introduction of genetic materials into cells. Success of gene therapy is highly dependent on the efficiency of cell engineering and the quantity of engineered cells. The “therapeutic genes” can be delivered to a cell’s nucleus using virus or virus-free gene delivery vectors. Virus-free vectors have several advantages over viral vectors as gene delivery vehicles. Despite these advantages of virus-free vectors, there remain challenges that need to be overcome.
One of these challenges is improving efficiency in gene delivery. Electroporation is currently one of the most efficient methods for gene delivery and is commonly used for virus-free gene therapy. However, following electroporation, viability and expansion capacity of cells are markedly reduced. GenomeFrontier’s Quantum Nufect™ overcomes these challenges of inefficient gene delivery and low cell viability following electroporation.
Quantum Nufect™ is a highly efficient and cost-effective universal electroporation buffer system. In conjunction with an electroporator (including, but not limited to Lonza's nucleofector™), it can be used to efficiently introduce DNAs, RNAs, or proteins into multiple cell types with minimal reduction in cell viability.
We demonstrated that Quantum Nufect™ facilitates highly efficient vector delivery into several hard-to-transfect cell types, including human primary T cells (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Quantum Nufect™ Facilitates Effective Transfection of Cell Lines as well as Primary Cells. Quantum NufectTM facilitates transfection of green fluorescent protein (pBRIGHT-GFP)-encoding plasmids into various cell types including human primary (A) mesenchymal stem cells (hMSC), granule neurons and CD8⁺ T cells (pMax-GFP, see (C)). This buffer system also facilitates the transfection of (B) commonly used HEK293 cells as well as the hard to transfect C17.2 cell line. (C) When comparing Quantum NufectTM with Lonza’s Human T Cell Nucleofector™ (HTCN) transfection buffer system, Quantum NufectTM was found to deliver markedly higher live cell transfection efficiency. Importantly, Quantum NufectTM preserved the viability (i.e. PI- staining) of more cells (96%) compared with cells that were transfected using Lonza’s HTCN transfection buffer system (41%). Viability is expressed as % of PI- cells (gated in purple, R2), and transfection efficiency is expressed as % of GFP⁺ and PI- cells (gated in green), with respect to the total cell population. Experiments were carried out using the Lonza Nucleofector 2B.
We further demonstrated that during CAR T cell production, Quantum Nufect™ not only preserves the viability of engineered T cells but also enhances cell expansion following electroporation, leading to a significantly higher final yield of CAR⁺ T cells (see Figure 2).
