使用急性淋巴细胞白血病患者来源的异种移植小鼠模型评估 CAR-T 细胞相关毒性

Chimeric antigen receptor T (CART) cell therapy has emerged as a powerful tool for the treatment of multiple types of CD19 + malignancies, which has led to the recent FDA approval of several CD19-targeted CART (CART19) cell therapies.

However, CART cell therapy is associated with a unique set of toxicities that carry their own morbidity and mortality. This includes cytokine release syndrome (CRS) and neuroinflammation (NI). The use of preclinical mouse models has been crucial in the research and development of CART technology for assessing both CART efficacy and CART toxicity. The available preclinical models to test this adoptive cellular immunotherapy include syngeneic, xenograft, transgenic, and humanized mouse models.

There is no single model that seamlessly mirrors the human immune system, and each model has strengths and weaknesses. This methods paper aims to describe a patient-derived xenograft model using leukemic blasts from patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia as a strategy to assess CART19-associated toxicities, CRS, and NI. This model has been shown to recapitulate CART19-associated toxicities as well as therapeutic efficacy as seen in the clinic.