You are here

Article Text

Article menu

Download PDFPDF

Regular and Young Investigator Award Abstracts
Cellular Therapies
399 Class I HLA-independent lysis of cancer cells by tumor-infiltrating CD8 T cells
  1. Hongyan Xie1,2,
  2. Aiping Jiang2,3,
  3. Jonathan Perera2,
  4. Moshe Sade-Feldman2,3,
  5. Nir Hacohen2,3,
  6. Robert T Manguso2,4 and
  7. Russell W Jenkins2,3
  1. 1Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA
  2. 2Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, MA, USA
  3. 3Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, Department of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
  4. 4Center for Cancer Research, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA

  • Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer (JITC) preprint. The copyright holder for this preprint are the authors/funders, who have granted JITC permission to display the preprint. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.

Abstract

Background Cancer immunotherapy with immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) has transformed the treatment of melanoma, although treatment resistance is common and fatal. Tumor-infiltrating CD8+ T lymphocytes (TILs) are key determinants of ICB response, and strategies to enhance tumor cell sensitivity to TILs is an emerging approach to overcome ICB resistance.

Methods We developed a patient-derived CD8+ TILs and cancer cells co-culture system. To identify cancer cell-intrinsic genes/pathways critical for CD8+ TIL-mediated killing CD8+ TILs, we performed a CRISPR screen using co-cultures of CD8+ TILs and cancer cells derived from patients with ICB-resistant melanoma.

Results To our surprise, TILs from ICB-resistant patients effectively killed matched melanoma cells, and traditional antigen presentation by human leukocyte antigen (HLA) class I was not required, suggesting the existence of other pathways for recognition and elimination of ICB-resistant melanoma cells by TILs. We further confirmed that established mediators of HLA-independent T cell killing (e.g., CD1d and MR1) and natural killer (NK) cell-related pathways (e.g., NKG2D) were not required for TIL-mediated killing. To nominate cancer cell-intrinsic genes/pathways critical for TIL-mediated killing, we performed a CRISPR screen which nominated death receptor signaling pathways and type I/II interferon (IFN) sensing pathways as crucial determinants of tumor control. Validation studies confirmed that both death receptor signaling and IFN pathways are necessary and sufficient for tumor cell lysis.

Conclusions Taken together, these findings indicate that ICB-resistant melanoma cells can be effectively targeted by CD8+ TILs via a novel mechanism involving cell extrinsic death receptor signaling and IFN sensing pathways.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/jitc-2023-SITC2023.0399

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.