Enhanced lentiviral gene delivery to mammalian cells via paired cell surface and viral envelope engineering

Lentiviral vectors that facilitate gene delivery to desired cell types have been widely used in routine laboratory research and therapeutic cell engineering. However, the lack of proper entry receptors on many cell types often results in poor gene delivery. Here, we present a simple paired virus-cell engineering approach that promotes lentiviral gene delivery into mammalian cells. Lentiviruses are dual-pseudotyped with VSV-G and a chimeric envelope protein specifically recognizing a small molecule fluorescein (αFITC-Env), and target cells are transiently labelled with FITC to create surrogate receptors for lentivirus attachment. The synthetic interaction between FITC-labeled cells and FITC-binding LVs enables efficient LV docking, viral entry and stable transgene expression in a range of mammalian cell lines and primary T cells. We showed that this approach enabled efficient delivery of a CD19-targeted chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) into naïve human T cells that are naturally refractory to conventional VSV-G LVs, which upon activation rapidly eradicated CD19 ⁺ leukemic cells. This paired cell surface and virus envelope engineering approach may serve as a universal method for engineering synthetic virus-cell interactions to improve lentiviral gene delivery to mammalian cells.