Cell Therapies of the Future with Dan Goodman

Chimeric antigen receptors, or CARs, repurpose the build-in targeting and homing signals of our immune system to direct T cells to find and eliminate cancers. Although CAR-T cells have transformed the care of liquid tumors in the circulating blood, like B cell leukemia and lymphoma, CAR-T therapy has shown limited efficacy against solid tumors. To unlock the full potential of CAR-T therapies, better receptor designs are needed. Unfortunately, the space of potential designs is too large to check one by one. To design better CARs, Dan and his co-author Camillia Azimi developed CAR Pooling, an approach to multiplex CAR designs by testing many at once with different immune costimulatory domains. They select the CARs that exhibit the best anti-tumor response and develop novel CARs that endow the T cells with better anti-tumor properties. Their methods and designs may help us develop therapies for refractory, treatment-resistant cancers, and may enable CAR-T cells to cure infectious diseases, autoimmunity, and beyond.