Induced Synthetic Intracellular Cytokine And Growth Factor Circuits For Cell Autonomous Control Of Cell Signaling, Proliferation, Survival And Cell State

Value Proposition

Cell therapies hold a lot of therapeutic promise across disease areas. One of the challenges in cell therapy development is finding a way to uniquely activate proliferation or survival of an engineered immune cell, without bystander activation of other cells that can detect that factor, or suppression by competitor cells that consume the cytokine of interest.

Technology Description

UCSF investigators have developed a genetically encoded molecular platform that enables immune cytokines and their receptors to signal from within the cell (intracellularly). This platform provides a powerful method to drive the proliferation or survival of immune cells, which could be used to improve therapeutic immune cells, particularly T cells (e.g. CAR T cells).

Related Materials

• Allen, G. M., Frankel, N. W., Reddy, N. R., Bhargava, H. K., Yoshida, M. A., Stark, S. R., Purl, M., Lee, J., Yee, J. L., Yu, W., Li, A. W., Garcia, K. C., El-Samad, H., Roybal, K. T., Spitzer, M. H., & Lim, W. A. (2022). Synthetic cytokine circuits that drive T cells into immune-excluded tumors. Science, 378(6625).

Patent Status

Patent Pending