Ellen Kim (BIRNBAUM LAB)

Engineering Lentiviruses for Gene Delivery to Antigen-specific T cells

The technology to isolate, expand, and engineer T cells has revolutionized cancer treatment. However, ex vivo T cell manipulations currently rely on lentiviral vectors with broad tropism for all activated T cells. In this project, we leverage a novel virus pseudotyping strategy to selectively modify antigen-specific T cell phenotypes in polyclonal populations. We hypothesize that this enhanced specificity will enable in vivo modification of anti-tumor T cells, providing additional functionality while avoiding systemic toxicities.

Caleb Perez (BIRNBAUM LAB)

caRNAseq: Exploring CAR Signaling Space via Pooled Single-cell RNA Sequencing

CAR T cell therapies have revolutionized the treatment of blood cancers, but their translation to solid tumors has been less successful. Although the signaling components of CARs have been implicated in the phenotype and efficacy of CAR products, systematic exploration of different signals has been limited. Here we propose a pooled RNA sequencing platform to rapidly characterize libraries of CARs with diverse signaling domains, aiming to identify transcriptional mechanisms driving CAR T cell phenotypes to inform next-generation CAR engineering.