Engineering model antigen-specific T cells to overexpress the chemokine receptor CXCR6 improves homing of adoptively transferred T cells in subcutaneous tumor models

CXCL16 was identified to be a highly expressed cytokine in human and murine pancreatic cancer. T cells do not express the receptor for CXCL16 (CXCR6). Using retroviral transduction tumor-specific T cells can be genetically modified to express CXCR6 resulting in an enhanced trafficking and tumor cell killing in vitro and in vivo.