부산대학교 도서관

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells are highly effective in treating B cell malignancies, but 50% of patients eventually relapse, often due to progressive dysfunction of the remaining CAR T cell population. While several others have implicated the bZIP transcription factor (TF) family in CAR T cell exhaustion (Seo et al. Nat Immunol. 2021, Lynn et al. Nature. 2019, Zhang et al. Cancer Cell. 2022), here we reveal a novel role for the TF Runx2 in mediating resistance to exhaustion and enhancing potency of CD8+ CAR T cells (CAR8). We have previously shown that CAR8 derived from naïve or memory T cell subsets maintain functional features of the T cell population from which they were derived (DeGolier et al. ASH. 2021). We predicted that an epigenomic and transcriptomic comparison of CAR8 derived from naïve or memory cells could reveal drivers of T cell differentiation and function.