Optimising expansion of CD8+ T cells for immunotherapy

CD8+ T cells protect against intracellular pathogens and cancers.

Their use in immunotherapy, however, has been hampered as growing them in vitro leads to ‘exhaustion’ and ‘senescence’ impairing their survival. This project aims to determine new pathways that control their growth using cytomegalovirus and leukaemic cells as systems of analysis.

This study aims to generate new understanding/reagents that will enable the expansion of highly functional T-cells for immunotherapy. Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is a herpesvirus that infects for life, causing major clinical disease in immune impaired, but also imprinting on healthy subjects, inducing large CD8+ T-cell expansions expressing CD57. CD57 is a carbohydrate Ag also found on T-cell large granular leukaemia (T-LGL). Current dogma considers CD57 a marker of senescence, although its function and the proteins that carry it remain unknown.

For further details of this project, please see our website: https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/research/programmes/project/optimising-expansion-of-cd8-t-cells-for-immunotherapy