Nonlinear dynamics of CAR-T cell therapy

Chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapy is considered a promising cancer treatment. The dynamic response to this therapy can be broadly divided into a short-term phase, ranging from weeks to months, and a long-term phase, ranging from months to years. While the short-term response, encompassing the multiphasic kinetics of CAR-T cells, is better understood, the mechanisms underlying the outcomes of the long-term response, characterized by sustained remission, relapse, or disease progression, remain less understood due to limited clinical data. Here, we analyze the long-term dynamics of a previously validated mathematical model of CAR-T cell therapy. We perform a comprehensive stability and bifurcation analysis, examining model equilibria and their dynamics over the entire parameter space. Our results show that therapy failure results from a combination of insufficient CAR-T cell proliferation and increased tumor immunosuppression. By combining different techniques of nonlinear dynamics, we identify Hopf and Bogdanov–Takens bifurcations, which allow to elucidate the mechanisms behind oscillatory remissions and transitions to tumor escape. In particular, rapid expansion of CAR-T cells leads to oscillatory tumor control, while increased tumor immunosuppression destabilizes these oscillations, resulting in transient remissions followed by relapse. Our study highlights different mathematical tools to study nonlinear models and provides critical insights into the nonlinear dynamics of CAR-T therapy arising from the complex interplay between CAR-T cells and tumor cells.