Department of Internal Medicine II, University Hospital of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany.
PlasmidFactory GmbH & Co. KG, Bielefeld, Germany.
Methods Mol Biol. 2022;2521:25-39. doi: 10.1007/978-1-0716-2441-8_2.
Development and application of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy has led to a breakthrough in the treatment of hematologic malignancies. In 2017, the FDA approved the first commercialized CD19-specific CAR T cell products for treatment of patients with B-cell malignancies. This success increased the desire to broaden the availability of CAR T cells to a larger patient cohort with hematological but also solid tumors. A critical factor of CAR T cell production is the stable and efficient delivery of the CAR transgene into T cells. This gene transfer is conventionally achieved by viral vectors. However, viral gene transfer is not conducive to affordable, scalable, and timely manufacturing of CAR T cell products. Thus, there is a necessity for developing alternative nonviral engineering platforms, which are more cost-effective, less complex to handle and which provide the scalability requirement for a globally available therapy.One alternative method for engineering of T cells is the nonviral gene transfer by Sleeping Beauty (SB) transposition. Electroporation with two nucleic acids is sufficient to achieve stable CAR transfer into T cells. One of these vectors has to encode the gene of interest, which is the CAR , the second one a recombinase called SB transposase, the enzyme that catalyzes integration of the transgene into the host cell genome. As nucleic acids are easy to produce and handle SB gene transfer has the potential to provide scalability, cost-effectiveness, and feasibility for widespread use of CAR T cell therapies.Nevertheless, the electroporation of two large-size plasmid vectors into T cells leads to high T cell toxicity and low gene transfer rates and has hindered the prevalent clinical application of the SB system. To circumvent these limitations, conventional plasmid vectors can be replaced by minimal-size vectors called minicircles (MC ). MCs are DNA vectors that lack the plasmid backbone, which is relevant for propagation in bacteria, but has no function in a human cell. Thus, their size is drastically reduced compared to conventional plasmids. It has been demonstrated that MC-mediated SB CAR transposition into T cells enhances their viability and gene transfer rate enabling the production of therapeutic doses of CAR T cells. These improvements make CAR SB transposition from MC vectors a promising alternative for engineering of clinical grade CAR T cells.
嵌合抗原受体 (CAR) T 细胞疗法的发展和应用在血液恶性肿瘤的治疗中取得了突破。2017 年,FDA 批准了首个商业化的针对 B 细胞恶性肿瘤的 CD19 特异性 CAR T 细胞产品。这一成功增加了将 CAR T 细胞扩大应用于更多血液系统恶性肿瘤和实体瘤患者的愿望。CAR T 细胞生产的一个关键因素是将 CAR 转基因稳定且有效地递送到 T 细胞中。这种基因转移通常通过病毒载体来实现。然而,病毒基因转移不利于经济实惠、可扩展和及时制造 CAR T 细胞产品。因此,需要开发替代的非病毒工程平台,这些平台更具成本效益,处理起来更简单,并且能够满足全球可用疗法的可扩展性要求。
一种用于 T 细胞工程的替代方法是非病毒基因转移的睡眠美人(SB)转座。用两种核酸进行电穿孔足以实现 CAR 稳定转入 T 细胞。其中一种载体必须编码感兴趣的基因,即 CAR,另一种载体编码一种称为 SB 转座酶的重组酶,该酶催化转座基因整合到宿主细胞基因组中。由于核酸易于生产和处理,SB 基因转移具有提供可扩展性、成本效益和广泛应用 CAR T 细胞疗法的可行性。
然而,将两种大型质粒载体电穿孔到 T 细胞中会导致高 T 细胞毒性和低基因转移率,从而阻碍了 SB 系统的广泛临床应用。为了规避这些限制,可以用称为 minicircles (MC) 的最小尺寸载体替代常规质粒载体。MC 是一种缺乏与细菌中增殖相关的质粒骨架但在人细胞中没有功能的 DNA 载体。因此,与常规质粒相比,它们的尺寸大大减小。已经证明,MC 介导的 SB CAR 转座到 T 细胞中增强了它们的活力和基因转移率,从而能够产生治疗剂量的 CAR T 细胞。这些改进使得 MC 载体介导的 SB CAR 转座成为工程化临床级 CAR T 细胞的一种很有前途的替代方法。
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