Genetic re-direction of canine primary T cells for clinical trial use in pet dogs with spontaneous cancer.

Immunocompetent pet dogs develop spontaneous, human-like cancers, representing a parallel patient population for the investigation of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) therapies. We have optimized a retrovirus-based protocol to efficiently CAR transduce primary T cells from healthy and tumor-bearing dogs. While transduction efficiencies and CAR-T expansion vary among dogs, CAR expression is typically higher and more stable compared with previous protocols, thus enabling human and comparative oncology researchers to use the dog as a pre-clinical model for human CAR-T cell research. For complete details on the use and execution of this protocol, please refer to Panjwani et al. (2020).