Differentiated CD8+ effector T cells mediate long-term immunity and protection against infectious diseases and cancer. Naive T cells are refractory to transduction with viral vectors without extensive ex vivo manipulations. A team of researchers at Harvard Medical School led by Drs. Sharpe and Haining developed a new method enabling in vivo manipulation of CD8+ T cells with stably integrated shRNAs. Bone marrow derived hematopoietic progenitor cells are transduced in vitro and injected into recipient animals, generating bone marrow chimeric animals with fully functional hematopoietic lineages that give rise to fully functional effector CD8+ T cells. This approach, published recently in PNAS (http://www.pnas.org/content/112/2/512.short ) can be used to study other cells of hematopoietic origin as well as to identify novel targets for treatment of infectious diseases and cancer immunotherapy. This patent pending technology is available for licensing or as the basis of a research collaboration.