Back to feed
News Story
DeepTech深科技
1 sources

Tsinghua's Zhao Yang: From Counterintuitive IL-10 to Artificial Immune Signals, Pushing Novel CAR-T Toward Clinic

Zhao Yang, an assistant professor at Tsinghua University, discovered that exhausted T cells upregulate IL-10 receptors, leading her to engineer CAR-T cells to secrete IL-10, which improves mitochondrial function and enhances anti-tumor activity. The work was published in Nature Biotechnology and has entered early clinical testing. She also expanded T-cell cytokine signaling at Stanford, with findings published in Nature. She was named to MIT Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35 China list for 2025.

SynthePulse Insight · AI deep readingMembers

From IL-10 to Artificial Immune Signaling: How Zhao Yang Reprograms T Cells to Advance Novel CAR-T Therapies Toward the Clinic

Version 1 · 1 source

Exhausted T cells upregulate IL-10 receptors, and secreting IL-10 improves CAR-T function; Zhao Yang shifts to receptor engineering to expand the T cell signaling 'alphabet,' advancing novel CAR-T therapies from mechanistic research to clinical application.

  • Exhausted T cells significantly upregulate IL-10 receptors; secreting IL-10 improves CAR-T mitochondrial status, proliferation, and effector function, leading to durable tumor clearance in multiple mouse solid tumor models.
  • The related paper was published in Nature Biotechnology in 2024 and featured on the cover; the patent has been licensed to Leman Biotech and is undergoing early clinical testing in patients with relapsed or refractory B-cell malignancies.
  • Postdoctoral research used an orthogonal IL-2 receptor system to introduce non-natural signals into T cells, revealing that different signals shape distinct states: IL-22R enhances stemness, while GCSFR induces myeloid-like features and phagocytic capacity.
Open section navigationCounterintuitive IL-10: From 'Suppressor' to 'Life-Saving Signal'

Counterintuitive IL-10: From 'Suppressor' to 'Life-Saving Signal'

In solid tumors, T cells often become exhausted due to chronic antigen stimulation and metabolic stress. Zhao Yang's team discovered that exhausted T cells significantly upregulate IL-10 receptor expression, sparking a counterintuitive hypothesis: this might be a 'distress signal' from T cells rather than mere immunosuppression.

Based on this, the team engineered CAR-T cells to secrete IL-10. Experiments showed that these cells had improved mitochondrial status, enhanced proliferation and effector function, and demonstrated durable tumor clearance in multiple mouse solid tumor models. The related paper was published in Nature Biotechnology in 2024 and featured on the cover.

Zhao Yang emphasized that cytokine effects cannot be simply categorized as 'activating' or 'suppressing'; they depend on receptor expression location, cell state, and downstream signaling dynamics. IL-10 may maintain T cell stemness through the STAT3 pathway, preventing excessive differentiation.

Free for now

Read the full analysis

5 more sections of analysis, plus the full takeaway

Loading

Credibility boundary

This article is based on DeepTech's interview with Zhao Yang, with information primarily from Zhao Yang's own statements, classified as source_claim level. Publication information (Nature Biotechnology 2024 cover, Nature 2025) is as reported by the source and has not been independently verified.

Sources for this version

  1. 对话清华赵扬：从反常识IL-10到人工免疫信号，她想推动新型CAR-T疗法走向临床DeepTech深科技

Primary report

DeepTech深科技

Primary source