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Linked CD4+/CD8+ T cell neoantigen vaccination overcomes immune checkpoint blockade resistance and enables tumor regression

Dolina, J. S.; Lee, J.; Brightman, S. E.; McArdle, S.; Hall, S. M.; Thota, R. R.; Lanka, M.; Premlal, A. L. R.; Greenbaum, J. A.; Cohen, E. E. W.; Peters, B.; Schoenberger, S. P.

2023-05-07 immunology
10.1101/2023.05.06.539290 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Therapeutic benefit to immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) is currently limited to the subset of cancers thought to possess a sufficient tumor mutational burden (TMB) to allow for the spontaneous recognition of neoantigens (NeoAg) by autologous T cells. We explored whether the response of an aggressive low TMB squamous cell tumor to ICB could be improved through combination immunotherapy using functionally defined NeoAg as targets for endogenous CD4+ and CD8+ T cells. We found that, whereas vaccination with CD4+ or CD8+ NeoAg alone did not offer prophylactic or therapeutic immunity, vaccines containing NeoAg recognized by both subsets overcame ICB resistance and led to the eradication of large established tumors that contained a subset of PD-L1+ tumor-initiating cancer stem cells (tCSC), provided the relevant epitopes were physically linked. Therapeutic CD4+/CD8+ T cell NeoAg vaccination produced a modified tumor microenvironment (TME) with increased numbers of NeoAg-specific CD8+ T cells existing in progenitor and intermediate exhausted states enabled by combination ICB-mediated intermolecular epitope spreading. The concepts explored herein should be exploited for the development of more potent personalized cancer vaccines that can expand the range of tumors treatable with ICB.

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