Skoltech researhers Mikhail Goncharov, Nikita Sharaev, Vadim Karnaukhov and Dmitriy Chudakov have co-authored a paper “Pinpointing the tumor-specific T cells via TCR clusters” that has been recently published in eLife journal. The authors of the article demonstrate that homology cluster analysis of T cell receptor (TCR) repertoires efficiently identifies tumor-reactive TCRs allowing to detect their presence within the pool of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), optimize TIL culturing conditions, with IL-2low/IL-21/anti-PD-1 combination showing increased efficiency, investigate surface marker-based enrichment for tumor-targeting T cells in freshly isolated TILs (enrichment confirmed for CD4+ and CD8+ PD-1+/CD39+ subsets), or re-stimulated TILs (informs on enrichment in 4-1BB-sorted cells). The researchers believe that this approach to the rapid assessment of tumor-specific TCR enrichment should accelerate T cell therapy development. Full text of the paper is available here.