PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Fatemeh S. Majedi
AU  - Mohammad Mahdi Hasani-Sadrabadi
AU  - Timothy J. Thauland
AU  - Song Li
AU  - Louis-S. Bouchard
AU  - Manish J. Butte
TI  - Augmentation of T-cell activation by oscillatory forces and engineered antigen-presenting cells
AID  - 10.1101/580704
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 580704
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/03/24/580704.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/03/24/580704.full
AB  - Activation of T cells by antigen presenting cells allows them to proliferate, produce cytokines, and kill infected or cancerous cells. We and others have shown that T cell receptors receive and in fact require mechanical forces from their own movements and the movements of antigen presenting cells. Emulation of T cell activation in vitro allows for the massive expansion of T cells necessary for clinical applications. In this paper, we studied the impact of augmenting novel artificial antigen presenting cells of various sizes and antigenic signal strength with mechanical, oscillatory movement. We showed that dynamic culture roughly doubles signal strength as compared to conventional, static culture. We demonstrated that tuning the strength of signal to a “sweet spot” allows for robust expansion of induced regulatory T cells, which is impeded by approaches that simply maximize activation.