Cell Reports (Mar 2023)

Strength of CAR signaling determines T cell versus ILC differentiation from pluripotent stem cells

  • Suwen Li,
  • Chloe S. Wang,
  • Amélie Montel-Hagen,
  • Ho-Chung Chen,
  • Shawn Lopez,
  • Olivia Zhou,
  • Kristy Dai,
  • Steven Tsai,
  • William Satyadi,
  • Carlos Botero,
  • Claudia Wong,
  • David Casero,
  • Gay M. Crooks,
  • Christopher S. Seet

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 42, no. 3
p. 112241

Abstract

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Summary: Generation of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells from pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) will enable advances in cancer immunotherapy. Understanding how CARs affect T cell differentiation from PSCs is important for this effort. The recently described artificial thymic organoid (ATO) system supports in vitro differentiation of PSCs to T cells. Unexpectedly, PSCs transduced with a CD19-targeted CAR resulted in diversion of T cell differentiation to the innate lymphoid cell 2 (ILC2) lineage in ATOs. T cells and ILC2s are closely related lymphoid lineages with shared developmental and transcriptional programs. Mechanistically, we show that antigen-independent CAR signaling during lymphoid development enriched for ILC2-primed precursors at the expense of T cell precursors. We applied this understanding to modulate CAR signaling strength through expression level, structure, and presentation of cognate antigen to demonstrate that the T cell-versus-ILC lineage decision can be rationally controlled in either direction, providing a framework for achieving CAR-T cell development from PSCs.

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