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Advances in Brief |
Robert W. Franz Cancer Research Center, Earle A. Chiles Research Institute, Providence Portland Medical Center [H-M. H., C. H. P., W. J. U., B. A. F.], Portland, Oregon 97213, and Departments of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology [H-M. H., B. A. F.] and Molecular Microbiology and Immunology [B. A. F.], Oregon Health and Science University, Portland, Oregon 97201
| ABSTRACT |
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4-fold in reconstituted lymphopenic hosts compared with normal hosts. Concomitantly, vaccination-induced Th1 T cells were also dramatically increased in vaccinated, reconstituted RAG1 hosts. T cells derived from reconstituted RAG1 hosts exhibited a higher level of melanoma-specific cytotoxicity in vitro. These cells were significantly more potent at mediating tumor regression in vivo after adoptive transfer into mice bearing established pulmonary metastases. Vaccination is best performed concomitantly with reconstitution; delayed vaccination resulted in T cells with less therapeutic activity. | Introduction |
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production, and CTL activity (5, 6, 7, 8, 9)
. Recent data also suggested a subset of naïve CD4+ T cells acquired memory-like function (secretion of IL3
-2 and IFN-
) after expansion in RAG1 mice (10)
. Because reconstitution of the T-cell compartment in lymphopenic hosts is regulated by the peptides occupying MHC class I and II molecules at the time of T-cell recovery, there may be an opportunity to skew the T-cell repertoire during T-cell recovery by engaging the available MHC class I and class II molecules with peptides of particular interest. If, as it appears, naïve T cells are more sensitive to activation by weak self-antigens during reconstitution of lymphopenic hosts, there may be a window during which immune tolerance may be broken. If MHC class I and class II molecules presented self peptides, which had been shown to serve as tumor-associated antigens, during a lymphopenic episode, the host may be repopulated with tumor-reactive T cells that could lead to better tumor control. To test this hypothesis, we monitored tumor-specific CD4 and CD8 T cells in TVDLNs from RAG1 mice vaccinated with melanoma cells after i.v. reconstitution with naïve spleen cells. Adoptive immunotherapy was performed using effector T cells generated from the TVDLNs of RLP hosts. | Materials and Methods |
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200 ng/ml/106 cells/24 h of GM-CSF. MCA 310 is a chemically induced fibrosarcoma from C57BL/6J mice. B16F10 melanoma is from American Type Culture Collection; B16F10-CIITA.28 is a stable clone that expresses the human MHC class II transactivator, which also exhibits high level I-Ab expression on the cell surface. CL8-1 is a stable clone of B16 melanoma that was transfected with a plasmid that encodes H-2 Kb. Tumor cells were cultured in CM, which consisted of RPMI 1640 (BioWhittaker, Walkersville, MD) containing 0.1 mM nonessential amino acids, 1 mM sodium pyruvate, 2 mM L-glutamine, and 50 µg/ml of gentamicin sulfate. This was further supplemented with 50 µM 2-mercaptoethanol (Aldrich, Milwaukee, WI) and 10% fetal bovine serum (Life Technologies, Inc., Grand Island, NY). Tumor cells were harvested two to three times per week by brief trypsinization and were maintained in T-150 or T-225 culture flasks. Hamster antimouse CD3 (clone 2c11) and CD28 (clone PV1) mAbs (American Type Culture Collection) were purified from culture supernatant by ammonium sulfate precipitation and ion exchange column chromatography.
Reconstitution, Vaccination, and in Vitro Sensitization.
RAG1 mice were reconstituted with 20 million naive spleen cells from wild-type B6 mice and then vaccinated with the D5-G6 tumor vaccine as described previously (11)
. Briefly, four aliquots of 1 x 106 tumor cells each were injected into both the fore and hind flanks of recipient mice. Eight days after vaccination, two enlarged inguinal and two auxillary TVDLNs were collected, and single cell suspensions were prepared by pressing lymph nodes between two sterile glass slides. The TVDLN cells were cultured at 1 x 106 cells/ml of CM in 24-well plates with 5 µg/ml 2c11 antibody (anti-CD3) and 5 µg/ml anti-CD28 mAb. After 2 days of activation, the T cells were harvested and subsequently expanded at 0.1 x 106 cells/ml in CM containing 60 IU/ml IL-2 (Chiron Co., Emeryville, CA) in Lifecell tissue culture flasks (Nexell Therapeutics, Inc., Irvine, CA) for 3 additional days. These in vitro activated and expanded cells are referred to as effector T cells.
Adoptive Immunotherapy.
Effector T cells were washed twice in HBSS and injected i.v. into B6 mice in which pulmonary metastases were established 3 days earlier by tail vein injection of 0.2 x 106 D5 tumor cells. Starting on the day of T-cell infusion, mice received 90,000 IU IL-2 i.p. once per day for 3 days. Animals were sacrificed at 13 days after tumor inoculation by CO2 narcosis. Lungs were resected and fixed in Feketes solution. The number of macroscopic pulmonary metastases was counted, and metastases that were too numerous to count accurately were assigned a value of 250.
Intracellular Cytokine Staining and Fluorescence-activated Cell Sorter Analysis.
For intracellular IFN-
release assays, four million effector T cells were either not stimulated or stimulated with 2 x 105 D5, MCA 310, F10, F10-CIITA.28 tumor cells, or anti-CD3 antibody in 2 ml of CM in 24-well plates. Brefeldin A was added, and the cells were incubated at 37°C for 1416 h. Cells were harvested and stained with FITC-labeled anti-CD8 antibody, Cy-chrome labeled anti-CD3 antibody, and PE-labeled anti-IFN-
antibody after fixing and permeabilization (Cytofix/Cytoperm kit; PharMingen, San Diego, CA). Fifty thousand gated events based on forward and light scatter were collected and analyzed, and all of the analysis was gated on CD3+ cells.
Cytotoxicity Assay.
In vitro cytotoxicity of effector T cells was determined as described previously (11)
. Tumor cells were incubated with 100 mCi of Na251CrO4 (DuPont NEN, Boston, MA) for 90 min, washed twice, and plated into round-bottomed, 96-well plates with 1 x 104 target cells/well in triplicate. The target cells were incubated with effector T cells at the indicated E:T ratios in a total volume of 200 µl of CM at 37°C in a CO2 incubator. The supernatant was harvested and counted, and the percentage of specific lysis was calculated as described previously (11)
. Maximum lysis was determined by incubating target cells with 2% Triton X-100 detergent.
| Results |
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ranged from 1.12 to 2.61%, depending on the tumor cells used for stimulation (Fig. 2A)
in response to the different cell lines is as follows: control MCA-310 (0.88%); D5 (1.83%); F10 (1.12%); F10-CIITA.28 (1.79%); and CL8-1 (2.61%; Fig. 2A
-producing CD8 T cells. The percentage of IFN-
producing cells at baseline was higher in effector T cells obtained from RLP vaccinated RAG1 mice: 2.24% and 2.5% CD8+ T cells producing IFN-
without stimulation or stimulated with MCA-310 in RLP hosts, compared with 0.55% with no stimulation and 0.88% with control MCA-310 in normal hosts. There was also a large increase in the percentage of melanoma-specific IFN-
-secreting CD8 T cells after stimulation of TVDLN effector T cells from RLP RAG1 hosts with different cell lines derived from B16 melanoma: D5 (6.64%); F10 (6.91%); F10-CIITA.28 (10.29%); and CL8-1 (8.16%). Although the "background" stimulation by the control tumor MCA-310 was greater in RAG1 mice compared with normal mice, the increase in melanoma-specific T cells also appeared to be greater in RAG1 mice. Interestingly, although <1% of CD4 T cells (CD3+CD8-) from D5-G6 vaccinated normal hosts responded to F10 or F10-CIITA (expressing low and high level of I-Ab molecules, respectively), a much larger proportion of CD4 T cells from vaccinated RLP RAG1 mice were stimulated to release IFN-
by F10 (3.62%) and F10-CIITA.28 (13.13%; Fig. 2B
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by CD4 and CD8 tumor-specific T cells in vaccinated normal and RLP RAG1 hosts was also examined. Results similar to those for IFN-
production were obtained. CD8 T cells from normal hosts exhibited an increased TNF-
response after stimulation with each of the melanoma cell lines but not the MCA-310 cell line (Fig. 2C)
production was higher, the largest increase in melanoma-specific TNF-
-producing CD4 T cells was found in RAG1 RLP compared with normal hosts (Fig. 2, C and D)
To determine whether effector T cells generated from RLP RAG1 mice exhibited tumor-specific cytotoxicity, a 6-h 51Cr-release assay was performed. Although effector T cells from both normal and RLP RAG1 mice failed to kill control tumor MCA 310, effector T cells generated from RLP RAG1 mice, but not normal mice, were highly cytolytic to D5 tumor cells in vitro (Fig. 3)
. These data demonstrate that vaccination during reconstitution of a lymphopenic host can result in a strong type 1 (both Th1 and Tc1) immune response.
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| Discussion |
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For many cancers, the tumor-associated antigens are unknown, and whole tumor cells are often used as vaccines. One way to enhance an antitumor immune response would be to devise a situation in which tumor-specific T cells are "tuned" to become more sensitive to activation by weak tumor antigens. It has been reported that a naïve T-cell repertoire could be skewed to increase the relative percentage of antigen-specific T cells if antigen was given during immune reconstitution (14) . Borrelle et al. (15) recently demonstrated enhanced efficacy of a GM-CSF gene-modified lymphoma vaccine in lethally irradiated mice reconstituted with T-cell-depleted bone morrow. Our findings extend the report of Borrelle et al. (15) in several important ways:
(a) Because vaccination is augmented in reconstituted RAG-1 mice that are not irradiated, it documents that the cytokine storm induced by lethal irradiation is not required for the increased antitumor effect.
(b) Because we used spleen cells and vaccinated immediately after reconstitution, it suggests that the augmented antitumor response does not require differentiation of new T cells from bone marrow stem cells. These two findings are likely the most important and clinically relevant observations of our study, because lethal whole body irradiation and bone marrow transplant will likely prove to be roadblocks to widespread clinical application of this vaccine strategy for solid tumors.
(c) In contrast to their use of TCR transgenic T cells and a foreign model tumor antigen, influenza hemagglutinin, to detect an increase in antigen-reactive T cells, we were able to show strong CD4 and CD8 T-cell responses to native antigens presented by tumor cells. These results also infer that vaccination during a time of natural lymphocyte recovery from lymphopenia could increase the magnitude of the immune response to a vaccine. Because lymphocyte recovery occurs regularly in treated cancer patients (16) , our data suggest that the development of transient lymphopenia after chemotherapy or irradiation may be exploited by vaccinating patients during these lymphopenic episodes to boost immunity and possibly induce tumor regression and prevent tumor recurrence.
Currently, little is known about the mechanisms that regulate the homeostasis of naïve T cells in lymphopenic hosts. Two nonexclusive explanations have been proposed to explain this phenomenon. One is the "fill up the space" hypothesis (17) , which states that naive and memory T cells occupy specific survival niches. The induction of lymphopenia empties these niches and allows naïve cells to expand and fill the empty "space." The other, regulatory, or suppressor cell hypothesis, proposes that regulatory cells counter self-reactive T cells and thereby prevent the development of organ-specific autoimmunity (18) . Of course, the same process would inhibit the priming of tumor immunity (19) . It is possible that regulatory cells were not transferred in sufficient number when RAG-1 mice were reconstituted with normal spleen cells to prevent the expansion and eradication of autoreactive T cells. The spleen cells used for reconstitution in our experiments were unfractionated; therefore, additional transfer experiments with spleen cells depleted of CD4+CD25+ regulatory T cells would be necessary to determine their role in priming therapeutic T cells during reconstitution of a lymphopenic host.
Neither hypothesis directly addresses the factors that drive naïve T cells to proliferate in the absence of exogenous antigenic stimulation. Our results can be explained best by the T-cell activation threshold tuning hypothesis proposed by Grossman and Paul (20) . Their hypothesis states that the immune system is designed to be moderately self-reactive and that self-reactivity is controlled by the activation threshold. It proposes that the immune system responds to episodes of "system perturbation," such as episodes of infection or lymphopenia. In our experimental model, there are two system perturbations, lymphopenia and a tumor vaccine. As a population, T cells respond to lymphopenia by tuning their activation threshold down to a level at which a subgroup of naïve T cells are driven to proliferate, even in the absence of foreign antigens. If tumor antigens are also present, T-cell responses could be focused on these peptides, and tumor-specific T cells may be preferentially driven to proliferate to reach a level sufficient to confer resistance to tumor growth. Repopulation of both CD4 and CD8 niches with a T-cell repertoire skewed in favor of melanoma-reactive T cells after vaccination in reconstituted RAG1 mice would explain our results.
Previously, we demonstrated that priming of therapeutic CD8 effector T cells in normal hosts is CD4 independent and that CD8, but not CD4 effector T cells, mediated tumor regression (11) . We observed a large increase in the number of Th1 CD4 effector T cells that appear to be MHC class II restricted and tumor specific in RLP RAG1 mice compared with normal hosts after vaccination with D5-G6. Because a large percentage of CD4 T cells were primed in vaccinated RLP RAG1 mice, we are currently reexamining the role of CD4 T cells during the priming and effector phases of adoptive immunotherapy. Preliminary experiments suggest that the adoptive transfer of either CD4 T cells derived from vaccinated RLP RAG1 mice but not from normal mice are highly therapeutic.4 We also plan to determine whether these CD4 T cells are melanoma specific and identify the antigens they recognize. Future experiments will determine whether tolerance in melanoma-specific CD4 T cells was broken by vaccination during reconstitution of lymphopenic hosts. Most interestingly, we observed both enhanced tumor protection and the rapid development of vitiligo after tumor challenge with the B16F10 melanoma cell line in reconstituted lymphopenic mice that had been vaccinated with irradiated unmodified B16F10 tumor cells.5 This supports our hypothesis that vaccination of RLP hosts with whole tumor cell vaccines can break immune tolerance to tumor antigens. In conclusion, our study suggests that active vaccination of T-cell reconstituted lymphopenic hosts can jump start or reboot the immune system in favor of strong immune responses to self-antigens and promote protection against tumor outgrowth. This strategy will be tested in future clinical trials.
| ACKNOWLEDGMENTS |
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| FOOTNOTES |
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1 This study was supported by grants from the Chiles Foundation, the M. J. Murdock Charitable Trust, and NIH Grant RO1 CA 80964 (to B. A. F.). ![]()
2 To whom requests for reprints should be addressed, at Providence Portland Medical Center, 4805 NE Glisan Street, Portland, OR 97213. Phone: (503) 215-6531; Fax: (503) 215-6841; E-mail: hhu{at}providence.org ![]()
3 The abbreviations used are: IL, interleukin; RLP, reconstituted lymphopenic; TVDLN, tumor vaccine draining lymph node; GM-CSF, granulocyte/macrophage-colony stimulating factor; CM, complete medium; mAb, monoclonal antibody; TNF, tumor necrosis factor. ![]()
4 C. H. Poehlein and H-M. Hu, unpublished results. ![]()
5 H-M. Hu. A poorly immunogenic tumor induces protective antitumor immunity in mice subjected to sublethal irradiation and immune reconstitution, manuscript in preparation. ![]()
Received 4/30/02. Accepted 6/ 3/02.
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