Engineering amino acid uptake or catabolism promotes CAR-T cell adaption to the tumour environment.

Cancer cells take up amino acids from the extracellular space to drive cell proliferation and viability. Similar mechanisms are employed by immune cells. The result is competition between conventional T cells, or indeed CAR-T cells, and tumour cells for limited availability of amino acids within the environment. We demonstrate that T cells can be re-engineered to express SLC7A5 or SLC7A11 transmembrane amino acid transporters alongside chimeric antigen receptors (CAR). Transporter modifications increase CAR-T cell proliferation under low tryptophan or cystine conditions with no loss of CAR cytotoxicity or increased exhaustion. Transcriptomic and phenotypic analysis reveals that downstream, SLC7A5/SLC7A11 modified CAR-T cells upregulate intracellular Arginase expression and activity. In turn we engineer and phenotype a further generation of CAR-T cells which express functional Arginase I/Arginase II enzymes, and have enhanced CAR-T cell proliferation and anti-tumour activity. Thus CAR-T cells can be adapted to the amino acid metabolic microenvironment of cancer, a hitherto recognised but unaddressed barrier to successful CAR-T therapy.