使用纯化的 AH1 肿瘤排斥抗原特异性 CD8(+) T 细胞群对小鼠进行癌症治疗

There is a growing interest in the use of patient-derived T cells for the treatment of various types of malignancies. The expansion of a polyclonal and polyspecific population of tumor-reactive T cells, with a subsequent infusion into the same donor patient, has been implemented, sometimes with positive results.

It is not known, however, whether a set of T cells with a single antigen specificity may be sufficient for an effective therapy. To gain more insights in this matter, we used naturally occurring T cells recognizing a retroviral peptide (AH1), which is endogenous in many tumor cell lines of BALB/c origin and which serves as potent tumor rejection antigen.

We were able to isolate and expand this rare population of T cells to numbers suitable for therapy experiments in mice (i. e. , up to 30 × 10 6 cells/mouse). After the expansion process, T cells efficiently killed antigen-positive tumor cells in vitro and demonstrated tumor growth inhibition in two syngeneic murine models of cancer.

However, AH1-specific T cells failed to induce complete regressions of established tumors. The incomplete activity was associated with a failure of injected T cells to survive in vivo, as only a very limited amount of T cells was found in tumor or secondary lymphoid organs 72 h after injection. These data suggest that future therapeutic strategies based on autologous T cells may require the potentiation of tumor-homing and survival properties of cancer-specific T cells.