Methods for the design and optimisation of chimeric antigen receptors (cars)

A method for designing a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR), comprising:

• a) defining a training set of one or more training CAR sequences, each of the one or more training CAR sequences in the training set encoding a training CAR, wherein each training CAR is associated with one or more properties;
• b) defining one or more objectives, each of the one or more objectives defining a desired property of a CAR;
• c) training a computational model using the training set of the one or more training CAR sequences to provide a trained computational model that outputs an approximation of the one or more properties of a CAR as a function of one or more features of a CAR sequence;
• d) using the computational model to provide at least one output CAR sequence, wherein the at least one output CAR sequence is not in the training set, and wherein the at least one output CAR sequence is determined based on the one or more objectives, and wherein the at least one output CAR sequence encodes a CAR.