Orthogonal Design of Experiments for Optimization of Lipid Nanoparticles for mRNA Engineering of CAR T Cells

Viral engineered chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapies are potent, targeted cancer immunotherapies, but their permanent CAR expression can lead to severe adverse effects. Nonviral messenger RNA (mRNA) CAR T cells are being explored to overcome these drawbacks, but electroporation, the most common T cell transfection method, is limited by cytotoxicity. As a potentially safer nonviral delivery strategy, here, sequential libraries of ionizable lipid nanoparticle (LNP) formulations with varied excipient compositions were screened in comparison to a standard formulation for improved mRNA delivery to T cells with low cytotoxicity, revealing B10 as the top formulation with a 3-fold increase in mRNA delivery. When compared to electroporation in primary human T cells, B10 LNPs induced comparable CAR expression with reduced cytotoxicity while demonstrating potent cancer cell killing. These results demonstrate the impact of excipient optimization on LNP performance and support B10 LNPs as a potent mRNA delivery platform for T cell engineering.