A new way of identifying viral pathogens reactivating in cellular therapy products.

Abstract

In this article, we discuss a recently published article that demonstrated a novel way of identifying viral pathogens reactivating in human cells to be used as cellular therapy, in this instance chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) Tcells. The authors used search engines and databases to identify viruses able to reactivate in T cells and then tested this initially in T-cell cultures, specifically human herpesvirus 6. This virus was then shown to reactivate infrequently in vitro and invivo in CAR T cells as a consequence of T-cell activation. The methodology may be most clinically useful for more frequently reactivating viruses in other types of cellular therapy such as allogenic CAR T cells or induced pluripotent stem cells.