Abstract
The functional fitness of CAR T cells plays a crucial role in determining their clinical efficacy. Several strategies are being explored to increase cellular fitness, but screening these approaches in vivo is expensive and time-consuming, limiting the number of strategies that can be tested at one time. The presence of polyfunctional CAR T cells has emerged as a critical parameter correlating with clinical responses. However, even sophisticated multiplexed secretomic assays often fail to detect differences in cytokine release due to the functional heterogeneity of CAR T cell products. Here, we describe a highly multiplexed single-cell secretomic assay based on the IsoLight platform to rapidly evaluate the impact of new pharmacologic or gene-engineering approaches aiming at improving CAR T cell function. As a key study, we focus on CD19-specific CAR CD8+ T cells modulated by miR-155 overexpression, but the protocol can be applied to characterize other functional immune cell modulation strategies.
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Conflicting Interests
L.G. has consulting agreements with Lyell Immunopharma, Instil Bio, and Advaxis. L.G. is on the scientific advisory board of Poseida Therapeutics and Kiromic and a stockholder of Poseida Therapeutics. E.H. and J.Z. are employed by and have equity ownership in IsoPlexis.
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Slavkovic-Lukic, D., Fioravanti, J., MartÃn-Santos, A., Han, E., Zhou, J., Gattinoni, L. (2024). Rapid Screening of CAR T Cell Functional Improvement Strategies by Highly Multiplexed Single-Cell Secretomics. In: Siciliano, V., Ceroni, F. (eds) Cancer Immunotherapy. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 2748. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-3593-3_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-3593-3_11
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