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CUTTING EDGE |
Surgery Branch, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892
| Abstract |
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-chain V region gene products expressed in samples obtained from 25 patients treated with this protocol. Sequence analysis demonstrated that there was a significant correlation between tumor regression and the degree of persistence in peripheral blood of adoptively transferred T cell clones, suggesting that inadequate T cell persistence may represent a major factor limiting responses to adoptive immunotherapy. | Introduction |
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In an attempt to enhance T cell engraftment and potentially improve clinical responses, 15 patients were treated with a nonmyeloablative but lymphodepleting chemotherapy regimen before the adoptive transfer of avid tumor-reactive CD8+ T cell clones (4). Clinical responses were not observed in this trial and, in the majority of patients who were examined, T cells did not appear to persist in the peripheral blood of recipients at significant levels beyond 12 days following transfer (M. Dudley, unpublished data). This suggested that factors that were intrinsic to the T cells may have been responsible for the lack of clinical responses as well as the lack of T cell persistence, and lead to a modification of the clinical trial to allow the adoptive transfer of polyclonal populations of TIL following lymphodepleting chemotherapy. We initially reported that objective clinical responses were observed in 6 of the 13 patients who received TIL following nonmyeloablative conditioning (5), and 18 of the 35 patients that have been treated in this trial to date have now demonstrated objective responses. High levels of lymphocytosis that were associated with the engraftment of tumor-reactive T cells have been observed in two of the patients in this trial, and tumor-reactive clones derived from the transferred TIL persisted at high levels in the peripheral blood of these patients for a period greater than 4 mo following transfer.
Samples obtained from 25 of the patients who have been treated in this protocol including 7 of the patients who were examined in the prior report have now been analyzed in an attempt to identify factors that are critically involved with clinical responses. The results presented in this report demonstrate that substantial persistence of the transferred cells is observed in many of the treated patients and that the degree of persistence of adoptively transferred T cells is strongly associated with objective clinical responses.
| Materials and Methods |
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The TIL used for this study were generated using high dose IL-2, followed by a rapid expansion using OKT-3 stimulation (5, 6). A single rapid expansion was conducted for all of the TIL with the exception of those from patient 7, which were expanded a second time. With the exception of patient 34, all of the patients that were treated expressed the HLA-A2 class I allele. The 25 patients selected for this study received chemotherapy conditioning with cyclophosphamide and fludarabine before adoptive transfer, as previously described (5). All of the patients analyzed in this study were selected on the basis of the availability of appropriate cryopreserved samples of PBMC obtained between 5 and 15 days following transfer to examine the short-term persistence of T cells, as well as
1 mo following transfer, to examine relatively long-term persistence of the transferred T cells. For three of the responding patients, samples were not available 1 mo following transfer, and persistence was determined at the earliest time point available, which was
2 mo following transfer. All of the samples were derived from the first nonmyeloablative treatment that was administered to patients, with the exception of three of the responders, patients 6, 7, and 30, each of whom had received a single prior nonmyeloablative treatment. Exclusion of these patients from the analysis of T cell persistence did not substantially alter the reported results.
TCR
-chain V region (TRBV) analysis
Analysis of cell surface TRBV expression was conducted with a panel of Abs directed against either individual TRBV gene products or TRBV gene families, obtained from Beckman/Coulter (Fullerton, CA) and Pierce/Endogen (Rockford, IL) as well as using 5' RACE analysis, as previously described (7). Briefly, a primer that was complementary to the TCR
-chain C region, 5'-CTCTTGACCATGGCCATC-3', was used with the SMART RACE cDNA Amplification kit (BD Biosciences, Palo Alto, CA) to amplify the TRBV region sequences expressed by polyclonal TIL samples. The germline genes that encoded the expressed TRBV products were identified by aligning the cloned sequences with the known TRBV gene sequences using the VectorNTI AlignX protocol (Invitrogen Life Technologies, Carlsbad, CA) and the highly variable sequences that resulted from joining the TRBV genes to the D
and J
regions were then compared to identify T cell clonotypes.
Evaluation of T cell Ag reactivity
Ag reactivity of the infused TIL and T cell clones was evaluated by determining the production of IFN-
in response to autologous and/or allogeneic melanoma cell lines as well as peptide-pulsed T2 cells. Two HLA-A2 tetramers (8) that were generated either with a modified MART-1:2635 peptide (Beckman/Coulter), MART-1:2635(2L), containing a substitution at the second amino acid from an alanine to leucine residue that enhances binding to HLA-A2 (9) or the native gp100:209217 peptide (10) (Beckman/Coulter) were used to evaluate reactivity of the infused TIL and T cell clones from HLA-A2-positive patients. The Ag reactivity of TIL from patients 17 and 30 was determined by measuring the up-regulation of cell surface CD107a expression following stimulation with autologous tumor cells, as previously described (11).
| Results and Discussion |
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The general characteristics of TIL that were administered to 25 patients who received prior nonmyeloablative chemotherapy, which included 7 patients who were analyzed in a prior study (5), were initially evaluated using multiple criteria. Thirteen of the 25 patients were objective clinical responders. The total number of T cells administered to patients that responded to therapy, 7.2 ± 1.2 x 1010 T cells (mean ± SD), and to patients that did not respond to therapy, 6.6 + 1.6 x 1010 T cells (mean ± SD), did not differ significantly. Neither the percentage of CD8+ T cells in the TIL that were administered to the patients, the ability of the administered TIL to recognize either known tumor Ags or autologous tumor cells, the length of time that TIL had been cultured in vitro, nor the rate of T cell proliferation before adoptive transfer were correlated with clinical response (data not shown). In addition, clinical response was not associated with general patient characteristics such as age and sex, or the sites of evaluable disease (data not shown).
Persistence of T cells following adoptive transfer
In the previous study of patients that had received TIL following nonmyeloablative chemotherapy (5), the persistence of populations of T cells was tracked through the use of Abs to individual TRBV gene products as well as through the use of tetramers of HLA class I molecules bound to an antigenic peptide. Approximately 50% of the TRBV gene products cannot be detected using the commercially available Abs, however, and many of the tumor-reactive T cell clones present in TIL appear to recognize unknown Ags and therefore cannot be tracked using MHC class I tetramers (data not shown).
In the current study, the representation of individual T cell clonotypes was evaluated by amplifying the TRBV genes expressed in samples of TIL and PBMC obtained following adoptive transfer using a primer that was complementary to the TCR
-chain region. The cDNA clones were assigned to a particular TRBV gene by alignment with germline sequences, and comparison of the unique sequences generated by joining of the TRBV, D, and J regions allowed the identification of individual T cell clonotypes. The relative representation of expressed TRBV gene products as determined by FACS analysis of samples of TIL and PBMC, which was conducted when Abs were available, was highly correlated with that obtained by sequence analysis of the same samples (p < 0.001) (Fig. 1). Distinct T cell clones that express rearranged products derived from the same TRBV germline gene cannot be distinguished using anti-TRBV Abs but can readily be identified by comparing the junctional regions of these transcripts. Therefore, patient samples were evaluated through the direct analysis of expressed TRBV gene products, which should provide the most reliable measurement of the relative frequency of individual clonotypes present in polyclonal populations of T cells.
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5% of the total sequences were identified in TIL from all but one of the nonresponding patients, patient 12, and TIL derived from responding and nonresponding patients demonstrated a similar distribution of clonotypes representing between 5 and 9%, 10 to 20%, and >20% of the total population of T cells that were administered. A total of 53 clones that were represented at levels of
5% were identified in TIL samples obtained from the 13 responding patients, and 37 over-represented clones were identified in TIL from the 12 nonresponding patients.
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12 mo following transfer that was dependent on the availability of patient samples (Table II). The level of persistence measured in the peripheral blood of responders 515 days following transfer averaged 58 ± 5% (mean ± SEM), and ranged from 36 to 96%, while the level of persistence observed in nonresponders 515 days following adoptive transfer averaged 28 ± 8% (mean ±SEM), and ranged from <1 to 87%. The levels of persistence observed in the responding patients were significantly higher than those observed in nonresponding patient (p2 = 0.008) when nonparametric statistical analysis was used to compare the two patient groups.
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The frequencies of individual TIL clonotypes that were detected in peripheral blood between 1 and 2 mo following transfer were also evaluated in responders and nonresponders (Fig. 2). At this time, persistent clonotypes were identified in PBMC obtained from all of the responding patients following adoptive transfer, but were detected in PBMC from only 6 of the 12 nonresponding patients. Two or more persistent clonotypes were detected in PBMC from 12 of the 13 responding patients, whereas multiple persistent clonotypes were detected in PBMC obtained from only 3 of the 12 nonresponding patients. There did not appear to be a significant degree of similarity between the sequences of dominant clonotypes identified from different patients.
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5% were studied because of the difficulty of determining the Ag reactivity of relatively small populations of cells. Eleven of the 13 responders had clonotypes that were persistent at a level
5%, and 8 of these were shown to be tumor reactive. The molecular identification of the Ags recognized was demonstrated in five of these patients (Table III). Only one of the nonresponders had a clone that persisted at a level
5%, and the reactivity of this clone is unknown.
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Several additional questions remain concerning the mechanisms involved with T cell persistence, as well as the relationship between the degree of T cell persistence and patient response. Although the levels of persistence observed in this trial were high relative to those observed in any prior cell transfer of effector T cells, significant differences in these levels were observed, even among responding patients. Only a relatively small percentage of the administered T cell clonotypes analyzed in this report were capable of persisting in vivo at levels of 1% or greater in circulating PBMC. Another issue raised by these findings is whether or not the durability of clinical responses are correlated with the levels of T cell persistence; however, the number of responding patients in this study was too small to evaluate this relationship. The absolute lymphocyte counts measured following adoptive transfer varied widely within samples of PBMC obtained from both responding and nonresponding patients, irrespective of the number of infused T cells, and did not appear to be associated with clinical responses (Table II). Thus, tumor regression in this trial was associated with the presence of at least one T cell clonotype in the infused TIL that was capable of persisting at readily detectable levels in peripheral blood following adoptive transfer, rather than with the absolute number of persistent T cells.
Several additional factors may also have influenced responses to adoptive immunotherapy that were observed in this trial. Proliferative potential, which may be related to the stage of differentiation of individual T cell clonotypes, may have played an important role in the persistence of the transferred T cells. The ability of T cells to home to tumor sites may also have influenced the clinical responses that were observed; however, the visceral location of most tumor deposits makes it difficult to evaluate T cell clonotypes in these tumors. The in vivo persistence of T cells following adoptive transfer may also be influenced by the relative avidity of their respective TCRs, which was not directly addressed in this study. Variations in tumor characteristics such as the levels of Ag or HLA gene expression may also have influenced responses to therapy and represent factors that could have obscured the relationship between persistence and clinical response. The fact that such an association was still observed in the face of these potentially confounding factors provides further evidence that persistence may be causally related to the response to adoptive immunotherapy.
These results suggest that persistent T cells, derived from TIL and collected from the peripheral blood of patients following adoptive transfer, play an important role in mediating tumor regression. Differences in the levels of T cell persistence between responding and nonresponding patients was observed as early as 1 wk following therapy, suggesting that the failure of T cells to survive at significant levels for even a relatively short period of time following adoptive transfer may be responsible for the lack of clinical responses observed in
50% of the patients treated in this protocol. A better understanding of the factors involved with maintaining the persistence of transferred tumor-reactive T cells may hopefully lead to the development of more effective adoptive immunotherapies.
| Acknowledgments |
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| Footnotes |
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1 Address correspondence and reprint requests to Dr. Paul F. Robbins, Surgery Branch, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Building 10, Room 2B42, Bethesda, MD 20892-1201. E-mail address: Paul_Robbins{at}nih.gov ![]()
2 Abbreviations used in this paper: TIL, tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte; TRBV, TCR
-chain V region. ![]()
Received for publication August 3, 2004. Accepted for publication September 8, 2004.
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