Immunological Synapse Predicts Effectiveness of Chimeric Antigen Receptor Cells

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-modified T cell therapy has the potential to improve the overall survival of patients with malignancies by enhancing the effectiveness of CAR T cells. Precisely predicting the effectiveness of various CAR T cells represents one of today's key unsolved problems in immunotherapy. Here, we predict the effectiveness of CAR-modified cells by evaluating the quality of the CAR-mediated immunological synapse (IS) by quantitation of F-actin, clustering of tumor antigen, polarization of lytic granules (LGs), and distribution of key signaling molecules within the IS. Long-term killing capability, but not secretion of conventional cytokines or standard 4-hr cytotoxicity, correlates positively with the quality of the IS in two different CAR T cells that share identical antigen specificity. Xenograft model data confirm that the quality of the IS in vitro correlates positively with performance of CAR-modified immune cells in vivo. Therefore, we propose that the quality of the IS predicts the effectiveness of CAR-modified immune cells, which provides a novel strategy to guide CAR therapy.