A high-density microfluidic bioreactor for the automated manufacturing of CAR T cells.

The manufacturing of autologous chimaeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells largely relies either on fed-batch and manual processes that often lack environmental monitoring and control or on bioreactors that cannot be easily scaled out to meet patient demands. Here we show that human primary T cells can be activated, transduced and expanded to high densities in a 2 ml automated closed-system microfluidic bioreactor to produce viable anti-CD19 CAR T cells (specifically, more than 60 million CAR T cells from donor cells derived from patients with lymphoma and more than 200 million CAR T cells from healthy donors). The in vitro secretion of cytokines, the short-term cytotoxic activity and the long-term persistence and proliferation of the cell products, as well as their in vivo anti-leukaemic activity, were comparable to those of T cells produced in a gas-permeable well. The manufacturing-process intensification enabled by the miniaturized perfusable bioreactor may facilitate the analysis of the growth and metabolic states of CAR T cells during ex vivo culture, the high-throughput optimization of cell-manufacturing processes and the scale out of cell-therapy manufacturing.

Computational modeling of light processing in the habenula and dorsal raphe based on laser ablation of functionally-defined cells.

BACKGROUND: The habenula is a major regulator of serotonergic neurons in the dorsal raphe, and thus of brain state. The functional connectivity between these regions is incompletely characterized. Here, we use the ability of changes in irradiance to trigger reproducible changes in activity in the habenula and dorsal raphe of zebrafish larvae, combined with two-photon laser ablation of specific neurons, to establish causal relationships. RESULTS: Neurons in the habenula can show an excitatory response to the onset or offset of light, while neurons in the anterior dorsal raphe display an inhibitory response to light, as assessed by calcium imaging. The raphe response changed in a complex way following ablations in the dorsal habenula (dHb) and ventral habenula (vHb). After ablation of the ON cells in the vHb (V-ON), the raphe displayed no response to light. After ablation of the OFF cells in the vHb (V-OFF), the raphe displayed an excitatory response to darkness. After ablation of the ON cells in the dHb (D-ON), the raphe displayed an excitatory response to light. We sought to develop in silico models that could recapitulate the response of raphe neurons as a function of the ON and OFF cells of the habenula. Early attempts at mechanistic modeling using ordinary differential equation (ODE) failed to capture observed raphe responses accurately. However, a simple two-layer fully connected neural network (NN) model was successful at recapitulating the diversity of observed phenotypes with root-mean-squared error values ranging from 0.012 to 0.043. The NN model also estimated the raphe response to ablation of D-off cells, which can be verified via future experiments. CONCLUSION: Lesioning specific cells in different regions of habenula led to qualitatively different responses to light in the dorsal raphe. A simple neural network is capable of mimicking experimental observations. This work illustrates the ability of computational modeling to integrate complex observations into a simple compact formalism for generating testable hypotheses, and for guiding the design of biological experiments.

Computational modeling suggests binding-induced expansion of Epsin disordered regions upon association with AP2.

Intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) are prevalent in the eukaryotic proteome. Common functional roles of IDRs include forming flexible linkers or undergoing allosteric folding-upon-binding. Recent studies have suggested an additional functional role for IDRs: generating steric pressure on the plasma membrane during endocytosis, via molecular crowding. However, in order to accomplish useful functions, such crowding needs to be regulated in space (e.g., endocytic hotspots) and time (e.g., during vesicle formation). In this work, we explore binding-induced regulation of IDR steric volume. We simulate the IDRs of two proteins from Clathrin-mediated endocytosis (CME) to see if their conformational spaces are regulated via binding-induced expansion. Using Monte-Carlo computational modeling of excluded volumes, we generate large conformational ensembles (3 million) for the IDRs of Epsin and Eps15 and dock the conformers to the alpha subunit of Adaptor Protein 2 (AP2α), their CME binding partner. Our results show that as more molecules of AP2α are bound, the Epsin-derived ensemble shows a significant increase in global dimensions, measured as the radius of Gyration (RG) and the end-to-end distance (EED). Unlike Epsin, Eps15-derived conformers that permit AP2α binding at one motif were found to be more likely to accommodate binding of AP2α at other motifs, suggesting a tendency toward co-accessibility of binding motifs. Co-accessibility was not observed for any pair of binding motifs in Epsin. Thus, we speculate that the disordered regions of Epsin and Eps15 perform different roles during CME, with accessibility in Eps15 allowing it to act as a recruiter of AP2α molecules, while binding-induced expansion of the Epsin disordered region could impose steric pressure and remodel the plasma membrane during vesicle formation.

Transcompp: understanding phenotypic plasticity by estimating Markov transition rates for cell state transitions.

MOTIVATION: Gradual population-level changes in tissues can be driven by stochastic plasticity, meaning rare stochastic transitions of single-cell phenotype. Quantifying the rates of these stochastic transitions requires time-intensive experiments, and analysis is generally confounded by simultaneous bidirectional transitions and asymmetric proliferation kinetics. To quantify cellular plasticity, we developed Transcompp (Transition Rate ANalysis of Single Cells to Observe and Measure Phenotypic Plasticity), a Markov modeling algorithm that uses optimization and resampling to compute best-fit rates and statistical intervals for stochastic cell-state transitions. RESULTS: We applied Transcompp to time-series datasets in which purified subpopulations of stem-like or non-stem cancer cells were exposed to various cell culture environments, and allowed to re-equilibrate spontaneously over time. Results revealed that commonly used cell culture reagents hydrocortisone and cholera toxin shifted the cell population equilibrium toward stem-like or non-stem states, respectively, in the basal-like breast cancer cell line MCF10CA1a. In addition, applying Transcompp to patient-derived cells showed that transition rates computed from short-term experiments could predict long-term trajectories and equilibrium convergence of the cultured cell population. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Freely available for download at http://github.com/nsuhasj/Transcompp. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

De novo ensemble modeling suggests that AP2-binding to disordered regions can increase steric volume of Epsin but not Eps15.

Proteins with intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) have large hydrodynamic radii, compared with globular proteins of equivalent weight. Recent experiments showed that IDRs with large radii can create steric pressure to drive membrane curvature during Clathrin-mediated endocytosis (CME). Epsin and Eps15 are two CME proteins with IDRs that contain multiple motifs for binding the adaptor protein AP2, but the impact of AP2-binding on these IDRs is unknown. Some IDRs acquire binding-induced function by forming a folded quaternary structure, but we hypothesize that the IDRs of Epsin and/or Eps15 acquire binding-induced function by increasing their steric volume. We explore this hypothesis in silico by generating conformational ensembles of the IDRs of Epsin (4 million structures) or Eps15 (3 million structures), then estimating the impact of AP2-binding on Radius of Gyration (RG). Results show that the ensemble of Epsin IDR conformations that accommodate AP2 binding has a right-shifted distribution of RG (larger radii) than the unbound Epsin ensemble. In contrast, the ensemble of Eps15 IDR conformations has comparable RG distribution between AP2-bound and unbound. We speculate that AP2 triggers the Epsin IDR to function through binding-induced-expansion, which could increase steric pressure and membrane bending during CME.

Wnt proteins synergize to activate ß-catenin signaling.

Wnt ligands are involved in diverse signaling pathways that are active during development, maintenance of tissue homeostasis and in various disease states. While signaling regulated by individual Wnts has been extensively studied, Wnts are rarely expressed alone, and the consequences of Wnt gene co-expression are not well understood. Here, we studied the effect of co-expression of Wnts on the ß-catenin signaling pathway. While some Wnts are deemed 'non-canonical' due to their limited ability to activate ß-catenin when expressed alone, unexpectedly, we find that multiple Wnt combinations can synergistically activate ß-catenin signaling in multiple cell types. WNT1- and WNT7B-mediated synergistic Wnt signaling requires FZD5, FZD8 and LRP6, as well as the WNT7B co-receptors GPR124 (also known as ADGRA2) and RECK. Unexpectedly, this synergistic signaling occurs downstream of ß-catenin stabilization, and is correlated with increased lysine acetylation of ß-catenin. Wnt synergy provides a general mechanism to confer increased combinatorial control over this important regulatory pathway.

Membrane permeability during pressure ulcer formation: A computational model of dynamic competition between cytoskeletal damage and repair.

Pressure ulcers are debilitating wounds that arise frequently in people who have lost mobility. Mechanical stress, oxidative stress and ischemia-reperfusion injury are potential sources of damage during pressure ulcer formation, but cross-talk between these sources has rarely been investigated. In vitro experiments with mechanically-induced cell damage previously demonstrated that non-lethal amounts of static cell deformation could induce myoblast membrane permeabilization. Permeabilization, in turn, has the potential to induce oxidative stress via leakage of calcium, myoglobin or alarmins. In this work, we constructed a hypothetical causal network of cellular-scale effects resulting from deformation and permeabilization, and we investigated the theoretical sensitivity of cell death toward various parameters and pathways of the model. Simulations showed that the survival/death outcome was particularly sensitive to the speed of membrane repair. The outcome was also sensitive to whether oxidative stress could decrease the speed of membrane repair. Finally, using the assumption that apoptosis and necrosis would have opposite effects on membrane leakage in dying cells, we showed that promoting apoptosis might under certain conditions have the paradoxical effect of decreasing, rather than increasing, total cell death. Our work illustrates that apoptosis may have hidden benefits at preventing spatial spread of death. More broadly, our work shows the importance of membrane repair dynamics and highlights the need for experiments to measure the effects of ischemia, apoptosis induction, and other co-occurring sources of cell stress toward the speed of membrane repair.