While CAR (Chimeric Antigen Receptor) T-cell therapy has become a promising alternative cancer treatment that can treat cancers that standard of care treatments cannot, clinical trials demonstrate the need to reduce cytotoxicity and off-target effects of current CAR-T cells. An optogenetic circuit was implemented with three recombinant constructs. This optogenetic circuit is composed of Gal4, Gal4’s binding site UAS (upstream activation sequence), CRY2-CIBN blue light-inducible dimers, and mScarlet red fluorescent reporter gene in place of CAR. We showed that by shining blue light on HEK-293T cells, CRY2 and CIB1 dimerizes to pull a Gal4 domain and a transcription activator together to increase the expression of a UAS-regulated reporter gene by 100-fold. We conclude that this circuit design potentially could be used to enable spatial and temporal control of CAR expression, but future work is needed to extend the applicability of this circuit design to treat multiple types of cancer.
- Python
- Pandas
- Numpy