Fig. 1: CD8⁺ CAR T cells from complete responders undergo a clonotypic shift in vivo.

a Schematic depicting sorting strategy, data generation, and single-cell multi-modal analysis of CAR T cells in peripheral blood from seven CAR T-cell therapy patients (P1-7) who exhibited complete responses with axicabtagene ciloleucel. Created in BioRender. Hu, Y. (2025) https://BioRender.com/hqo12oz. b Representative flow plots depicting anti-CD3 and CD19 antigen-tetramer staining of peripheral blood mononuclear cells from P3 versus a healthy donor. CD3⁺Tet⁺ (“CAR”) and CD3⁺Tet⁻ (“ENDO”) patient cells were sorted from the indicated gates. c Violin plots depicting normalized CAR transgene mRNA expression of sorted CAR and ENDO T cells, split by CD4⁺ (left) and CD8⁺ (right) subsets. Expression levels were compared by two-sided Wilcoxon Rank-Sum test with Bonferroni correction, whereby **** indicates p < 0.0001. d Line plots depicting expansion and contraction of peripheral blood CAR abundance over the course of therapy. e, f Bar graphs and heatmaps depicting overlap coefficients for TCR clonotypes comparing CAR (left) and ENDO (right) repertoires between T_exp, T_per1, and T_per2. Overlap coefficients were compared by two-sided t test, whereby * indicates p < 0.05 and ns indicates not significant. Each dot represents a measurement from a single patient (n = 7). Data are presented as mean values ± SEM. Exp expansion stage, Per persistence stage. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.