Back

Recurrent RNA-lipoplex vaccination is required to sustain functional tumor-infiltrating neoantigen-specific CD8 T cells and therapeutic efficacy

Gibson, J. T.; Hornburg, M.; Lehar, S.; Javinal, V.; Liao, L.; McCarron, M. J.; Jones, T. N.; Oei, Y.; Dunlap, D.; Marroquin, K. A.; Lo, A. A.; Bergman, J. H.; Tong, A.-J.; Nissenbaum, A.; Freund, E. C.; Capietto, A.-H.; de la Cruz, C. C.; Sahin, U.; Mellman, I.; Schartner, J. M.; Delamarre, L.

2025-11-16 immunology
10.1101/2025.11.16.687774 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Cancer vaccines induce durable, polyepitopic T cell responses, and show promising clinical benefit in adjuvant settings, yet they are largely ineffective in advanced disease. Using a clinically relevant RNA-lipoplex vaccine, we investigated the efficacy constraints in a preclinical model. Vaccination remodeled the tumor microenvironment (TME), increasing T cell infiltration and promoting a proinflammatory myeloid compartment. This was associated with complete regression of smaller, immature tumors, but only delayed growth of larger, established tumors. While vaccine-induced T cells were long-lived and functional in peripheral tissues, intratumoral T cells declined rapidly in abundance, diversity, and function, reverting to a prevaccine-like state. scRNA-seq suggested that this was driven by a pro-apoptotic program, with surviving T cells showing signatures of cellular stress and impaired activation. Importantly, recurrent vaccination replenished functional T cells in the TME and enhanced efficacy. These findings highlight the importance of optimizing vaccine schedules and tailoring therapeutic strategies to tumor stage.

Matching journals

The top 4 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.