BioCentury
ARTICLE | Translation in Brief

Minority power

How a tiny minority of T cells ends up dominating anti-tumor response

March 28, 2017 4:07 PM UTC

A Science Immunology study suggests the most potent antitumor T cells in patients may originate from the least abundant T cell clones in their blood. The authors are now investigating the gene expression signatures of these very low frequency T cells, and hope to tap their biology to improve T cell therapies.

The team included scientists from Adaptive Biotechnologies Corp., who used the company’s high throughput T cell receptor β chain (TCRB) sequencing technology to turn each cell’s TCR genes into a clone-specific barcode. By enabling more sensitive tracking of a broader swath of different T cell clones than had been possible with traditional T cell monitoring techniques, study author Aude Chapuis said the method was key to finding rare tumor-specific T cells in a sea of bystander cells. Chapuis is an assistant member in the clinical research division of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center...