eLife Assessment: The 1000+ mouse project: large–scale spatiotemporal parametrization and modeling of preclinical cancer immunotherapies

Preclinical studies of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell immunotherapies are often based on monitoring bioluminescent tumors implanted in mice to assess anti-tumor cytotoxicity. Here, we introduce maRQup (murine automatic Radiance Quantification and parametrization), an easy-to-use method that automatically processes bioluminescent tumor images for quantitative analysis. We demonstrate the ability of maRQup to analyze CAR-T cell treatments over >1,000 tumor-bearing mice. We compare CD19-targeting CAR-T cells comprising either a CD28 or a 4-1BB costimulatory domain, and found the former controlled the tumor burden better initially, while the latter reduced the frequency of tumor relapse. We also applied maRQup to demonstrate faster tumor growth during the initial growth phase as compared to the relapse phase and to spatiotemporally analyze the high variability in immunotherapeutic control of tumors, based on their anatomical location. maRQup provides quantitative and statistically-robust insights on preclinical experiments that will contribute to the optimization of immunotherapies.