In Vivo Detection of CAR-T cell Immunotherapy using 3 Tesla Fluorine-19 MRI
Abstract
Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy is an emerging cancer treatment that has shown remarkable success in the treatment of B cell malignancies. However, this therapy still has the potential to cause severe toxicities or poor treatment responses in some patients. An imaging tool for tracking CAR-T cells could provide important patient-specific data on CAR-T cell fate. In chapter 2, fluorine-19 magnetic resonance imaging (19F MRI) was evaluated as a method to track the location of 19F perfluorocarbon (PFC) labeled CAR-T cells non-invasively in a mouse model of B cell leukemia. We show for the first time that PFC labeled CAR-T cells can be detected with a 3 Tesla clinical MR scanner and that PFC labeled CAR-T cells show no significant difference in treatment response compared to unlabeled CAR-T cells as evaluated with bioluminescence imaging. Chapter 3 summarizes the study and discusses the limitations and future work.