One of the mechanisms that prevent the destruction of the immune system is functional silencing T cells, known as T cell exhaustion, which is also utilized by viruses and cancers to induce immune escape. T cell exhaustion is a state of T cell dysfunction that occurs in many cancers. In the case of tumors and chronic infections, NK cells exhibit an exhausted state similar to T cells, showing poor effector function and altered phenotype. Exhaustion of T/NK cells in the tumor microenvironment (TME) results in a decrease in the ability to produce effective immune responses to eliminate tumors. Reversing or preventing CAR-T/NK cells exhaustion is the main research field of cancer immunotherapy.
Currently, multiple phenotypes and functional parameters need to be analyzed to identify CAR-T/NK cell exhaustion. Better understanding of the CAR-T/NK cell exhaustion mechanism and the identification of unique phenotypic markers of T/NK cells will greatly promote the development of adoptive cell transfer strategies.
Creative Biolabs's proprietary assays effectively mimic the tumor microenvironment and determine the exhaustion status of T/NK cells, allowing you to simultaneously measure expression levels of up to hundreds of cytokines using standard Western blotting equipment. Flow cytometry is used to detect CAR T cell–infiltrated tumor cells, followed by detection of multiple markers in one sample.
Fig1 T Cell Exhaustion Markers (Okoye I S, 2017)
CD8 + T cells
CD4 + T cells
Fig2 NK Cell Exhaustion (Bi J and Tian Z, 2017)
In this assay, fresh isolated human PBMCs are stimulated with a fixed concentration of compounds for three days. The media is harvested for hallmark measurements.
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