Improved CAR immune cell function; plus AlphaMissense and more

A group led by Arsenal Biosciences Inc. co-founders Alexander Marson from Gladstone Institutes and Theodore Roth from Stanford University described in Cell a method, dubbed ModPoKI, to test large pools of knock-in sequences for the ability to reprogram cell functions. The authors built two ModPoKI libraries of 100 transcription factors and 129 surface receptors, and found that a BATF-TFAP4 dual knock-in construct improved CAR T cell fitness and function.

A group from La Jolla Institute for Immunology had previously shown that engineering CAR T cells to overexpress BATF could help treat solid tumors...