Limiting metabolic stress by redirecting glucose flux during in vitro expansion improves efficacy of T cell therapies for cancer

Adoptive cell therapies for cancer treatment often fail due to a lack of T cell survival and persistence within the patient. Redirecting glycolytic processing with dichloroacetate (DCA) during in vitro expansion improves immediate and long-term T cell engraftment by up to 8x - ultimately resulting in a drastic improvement in tumor clearance. Here we use bulk RNA sequencing to interrogate the changes in transcriptional programs resultant of DCA treatment that may confer the observed improvement in engraftment and tumor clearance of DCA-treated T cells. Gene expression analysis of bulk RNA-seq of CD8+ T cells from 6 different mice (OT-1 or pmel-1) and 2 different experiments (3 mice per experiment) expanded with or without DCA for 7 days.