Applications of single-cell omics for chimeric antigen receptor T cell therapy

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy is a promising cancer treatment modality. The breakthroughs in CAR T cell therapy were, in part, possible with the help of cell analysis methods, such as single-cell analysis. Bulk analyses have provided invaluable information regarding the complex molecular dynamics of CAR T cells, but their results are an average of thousands of signals in CAR T or tumour cells. Since cancer is a heterogeneous disease where each minute detail of a subclone could change the outcome of the treatment, single-cell analysis could prove to be a powerful instrument in deciphering the secrets of tumour microenvironment for cancer immunotherapy. With the recent studies in all aspects of adoptive cell therapy making use of single-cell analysis, a comprehensive review of the recent preclinical and clinical findings in CAR T cell therapy was needed. Here, we categorized and summarized the key points of the studies in which single-cell analysis provided insights into the genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics and proteomics as well as their respective multi-omics of CAR T cell therapy.