Through the process of trogocytosis, a CAR T cell (green) transfers CAR molecules (white) across the plasma membrane of a recipient T cell (magenta).
Credit: Stefano Barbera
Researchers revealed for the first time that CAR T cells can transfer their CAR molecules to regular T cells in a process known as trogocytosis.
While developing a way to get chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells into the brain tumor microenvironment of mice, Stefano Barbera “bumped into” an entirely different discovery, he said. As a molecular biologist and new postdoctoral fellow in Anna Dimberg’s lab at Uppsala University, Barbera had planned to engineer multiple types of CAR T cells that would bind in different ways to brain endothelial cells. He had been preparing a mixture of T cells from different mouse strains, but while checking the…