Recent work using cell avidity measurements by the Gottschalk lab at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital (published in Nature Biotechnology) sought to tune CAR synapses in NK cells by adding an intracellular scaffolding protein binding site to the CAR called the PDZ binding motif.
Key learning points
- Cell avidity is used to identify CAR-NK cells with improved synapse strength and in vivo tumor J10 leading to potential improvements in therapeutic efficacy.
- Enhanced avidity helps to overcome trogocytosis-mediated relapse and improves in vivo tumor clearance, thus prolonging the survival rate of CAR-NK cells by tuning synapse interactions.
- High-avidity CAR-NK cells display lower levels of trogocytosis than low-avidity cells.
