Back

Pluripotent stem cell-derived siTNK cells attack tumors via a synthetic CD8-CD28 TCR complex

Zheng, X.; Zhang, F.; Lin, Y.; Hu, F.; Weng, Q.; Liu, P.; Wang, Z.; Zhang, C.; Liu, Y.; Liu, L.; Zhu, Y.; Xiao, Z.; Wang, Y.; Zhang, L.; Qi, H.; Shen, Y.; Chen, Y.; Wu, J.; Xu, J.; Zhao, Y.; Wang, T.; Huang, D.; Xia, C.; Wang, J.; Zhang, M.

2025-07-12 immunology
10.1101/2025.07.11.663392 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Tumor-associated antigen-specific T cell receptor (TCR)-engineered T cells offer a promising strategy for cancer therapy. Natural killer (NK) cells exhibit broad anti-tumor activity with low side effects but lack the capacity to recognize intracellular antigens. Here, we found that the human pluripotent stem cell (hPSC)-derived iNK cells, unlike tissue-isolated NK cells, expressed all four CD3 subunits at the transcriptome level. We introduced a synthetic gene-expressing complex (SCOTR), encoding a tumor antigen- specific TCR, CD8 coreceptor, and CD28 costimulatory molecule, into hPSCs to generate SCOTR-hPSCs. The SCOTR-hPSCs gave rise to abundant synthetic TCR complex-expressing iNK (siTNK) cells via an organoid induction method. These siTNK cells showed HLA-dependent, antigen-specific cytotoxicity against tumor cells and significantly suppressed tumor growth in tumor xenograft animal models, while also preserving universal non-specific tumor-killing activity. Collectively, siTNK cells, as hPSC-derived hybrid cells with dual features of adaptive T and inherent NK cells, offer an artificial cell source for human immunotherapies.

Matching journals

The top 8 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.