UC San Diego

While chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) therapy has emerged as a promising method for cancer therapy by engineering autologous T cells to redirect them to the specific tumor-associate antigen and kill the tumor cells, these engineered T cells also have “on-target, off-tumor” toxicity, which can harm normal tissues and can be life-threatening. The non-specific activity inspires us to control CAR expression with high spatiotemporal precisions. Therefore, we present the design of heat inducible CAR, which can upregulate CAR expression after heat stimulation. The thesis introduces the study of heat inducible anti-prostate specific membrane antigen (PSMA) CAR T cells, which has been proved to be able to sense heat and produce CARs for the targeting of prostate cancer cells and triggering activation of T cells. The study can serve as a foundation for broader application in solid tumor therapy.