Bicistronic CAR T-cells Against CD70 & Active Integrin β2 Overcome Antigen Heterogeneity and Preserve Safety in Acute Myeloid Leukemia

Abstract

The surface antigen landscape of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) displays significant heterogeneity and overlap with healthy hematopoietic cells. This imparts a substantial hurdle to the development of AML-targeting chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cells that can avoid on- target, off-tumor toxicity. Here, we develop a dual-antigen targeting CAR-T against CD70 and the active conformation of integrin {beta}2 (aITGB2), each previously reported as promising AML targets due to minimal off-tumor expression. We show an OR-gated approach for these antigens significantly increases the proportion of AML blasts that can be targeted, in part using a novel ex vivo co-culture method to restore surface protein homeostasis following a freeze-thaw cycle. We test dual-targeting CAR-T constructs with different combinations of costimulatory domains, identifying constructs with superior anti-tumor cytotoxicity in vitro against AML cell line and patient-derived xenograft models. We further show significantly improved in vivo tumor clearance and survival for a dual-targeting CAR in murine models of AML tumor heterogeneity. Finally, we show that this dual-targeting CAR does not increase off-tumor toxicity, especially against hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells. Together, these findings demonstrate a promising clinically-translatable approach for the treatment of AML without the notable toxicity liabilities associated with other leading CAR-T targets for this disease.