Discovery of tumor-reactive T cell receptors by massively parallel library synthesis and screening

Abstract

T cell receptor (TCR) gene therapy is a potent form of cellular immunotherapy in which patient T cells are genetically engineered to express TCRs with defined tumor reactivity. However, the isolation of therapeutic TCRs is complicated by both the general scarcity of tumor-specific T cells among patient T cell repertoires and the patient-specific nature of T cell epitopes expressed on tumors. Here we describe a high-throughput, personalized TCR discovery pipeline that enables the assembly of complex synthetic TCR libraries in a one-pot reaction, followed by pooled expression in reporter T cells and functional genetic screening against patient-derived tumor or antigen-presenting cells. We applied the method to screen thousands of tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL)-derived TCRs from multiple patients and identified dozens of CD4+ and CD8+ T-cell-derived TCRs with potent tumor reactivity, including TCRs that recognized patient-specific neoantigens.