{"doi":"10.1371/journal.pone.0238819","title":"Activation and degranulation of CAR-T cells using engineered antigen-presenting cell surfaces","abstract":"Adoptive cell transfer of Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR)-T cells showed promising results in patients with B cell malignancies. However, the detailed mechanism of CAR-T cell interaction with the target tumor cells is still not well understood. This work provides a systematic method for analyzing the activation and degranulation of second-generation CAR-T cells utilizing antigen-presenting cell surfaces. Antigen-presenting cell surfaces composed of circular micropatterns of CAR-specific anti-idiotype antibodies have been developed to mimic the interaction of CAR-T cells with target tumor cells using micro-contact printing. The levels of activation and degranulation of fixed non-transduced T cells (NT), CD19.CAR-T cells, and GD2.CAR-T cells on the antigen-presenting cell surfaces were quantified and compared by measuring the intensity of the CD3ζ chain phosphorylation and the Lysosome-Associated Membrane Protein 1 (LAMP-1), respectively. The size and morphology of the cells were also measured. The intracellular Ca2+ flux of NT and CAR-T cells upon engagement with the antigen-presenting cell surface was reported. Results suggest that NT and CD19.CAR-T cells have comparable activation levels, while NT have higher degranulation levels than CD19.CAR-T cells and GD2.CAR-T cells. The findings show that antigen-presenting cell surfaces allow a quantitative analysis of the molecules involved in synapse formation in different CAR-T cells in a systematic, reproducible manner.","journal":"PLoS ONE","year":2020,"id":84232,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":10,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9555,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":433242,"name":"Teal Russell","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":432353,"name":"Lumei Liu","orcid":"0000-0002-9014-757X","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":243473,"name":"Sarah Ahn","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":84668,"name":"Gianpietro Dotti","orcid":null,"position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":402219,"name":"Shyam Aravamudhan","orcid":"0000-0001-9968-7188","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":364970,"name":"Laura Conforti","orcid":"0000-0002-3761-7595","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":432354,"name":"Yeoheung Yun","orcid":"0000-0003-2288-6052","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":432352,"name":"Qassim Dirar","orcid":"0000-0002-4258-4695","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":33,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T21:54:50.827092Z","pmid":"32976541","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}