Spinoculation and retronectin highly enhance the gene transduction efficiency of Mucin-1-specific chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) in human primary T cells

Alireza Rajabzadeh,Fatemeh Rahbarizadeh,Amir Ali Hamidieh

doi:10.1186/s12860-021-00397-z

Alireza Rajabzadeh, Fatemeh Rahbarizadeh + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1186/s12860-021-00397-z

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Abstract

BackgroundProducing an appropriate number of engineered cells is considered as one of the influential factors in the successful treatments with chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells. To this aim, the transduction rate of the viral vectors can play a significant role. In addition, improving transduction rates can affect the success rate of this treatment due to hard-transduced T lymphocytes.ResultsIn this study, activated T cells were transduced using different transduction methods such as spinoculation, retronectin, polybrene, spinoculation + retronectin, and spinoculation + polybrene after selecting the most efficient transfection method to produce recombinant viral particles containing MUC1 CAR. PEI and lipofectamine with the amount of 73.72 and 72.53%, respectively, showed the highest transfection rates with respect to calcium phosphate (14.13%) for producing lentiviral particles. However, the cytotoxicity of transfection methods was not significantly different. Based on the results, spinoculation + retronectin leads to the highest transduction rates of T cells (63.19 ± 4.45%) relative to spinoculation + polybrene (34.6 ± 4.44%), polybrene (10.23 ± 0.79%), retronectin (10.37 ± 1.85%), and spinoculation (21.11 ± 1.55%). Further, the polybrene (40.02%) and spinoculation + polybrene (48.83% ± 4.83) increased cytotoxicity significantly compared to other groups.ConclusionImproving transduction conditions such as using spinoculation with retronectin can ameliorate the production of CAR-T cells by increasing the rate of transduction, as well as the success rate of treatment.

Highlights

Producing an appropriate number of engineered cells is considered as one of the influential factors in the successful treatments with chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells
The use of genetically modified T lymphocytes targeting CD19 leads to remission in 70– 90% of children with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL)) [1, 2]
Redirecting T lymphocytes against MUC1-positive breast cancer cells by CAR technology was first developed and characterized by Scott Wilkie et al and indicated that the MUC1-targeting CAR T cells efficiently eliminate breast tumors [4]

Summary

Introduction

Producing an appropriate number of engineered cells is considered as one of the influential factors in the successful treatments with chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells. To this aim, the transduction rate of the viral vectors can play a significant role. The use of genetically modified T lymphocytes targeting CD19 leads to remission in 70– 90% of children with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL) [1, 2]. These redirected T cells express a synthetic receptor called the CAR which recognizes the CD19. The results demonstrated that the 5E5-based CAR T cells significantly targeted multiple types of cancer cells expressing the Tn-MUC1, including breast cancer cells, leukemia cells, and pancreatic cancer cells, [5]

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