Expansion and CD2/CD3/CD28 stimulation enhance Th2 cytokine secretion of human invariant NKT cells with retained anti-tumor cytotoxicity

Rapid Generation of Therapeutic Nanoparticles Using Cell-Free Expression Systems

The surface modification of membrane-based nanoparticles, such as liposomes, polymersomes, and lipid nanoparticles, with targeting molecules, such as binding proteins, is an important step in the design of therapeutic materials. However, this modification can be costly and time-consuming, requiring cellular hosts for protein expression and lengthy purification and conjugation steps to attach proteins to the surface of nanocarriers, which ultimately limits the development of effective protein-conjugated nanocarriers. Here, the use of cell-free protein synthesis systems to rapidly create protein-conjugated membrane-based nanocarriers is demonstrated. Using this approach, multiple types of functional binding proteins, including affibodies, computationally designed proteins, and scFvs, can be cell-free expressed and conjugated to liposomes in one-pot. The technique can be expanded further to other nanoparticles, including polymersomes and lipid nanoparticles, and is amenable to multiple conjugation strategies, including surface attachment to and integration into nanoparticle membranes. Leveraging these methods, rapid design of bispecific artificial antigen presenting cells and enhanced delivery of lipid nanoparticle cargo in vitro is demonstrated. It is envisioned that this workflow will enable the rapid generation of membrane-based delivery systems and bolster our ability to create cell-mimetic therapeutics.

Natural killer T cells and other innate-like T lymphocytes as emerging platforms for allogeneic cancer cell therapy

T cells expressing chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) have achieved major clinical success in patients with hematologic malignancies. However, these treatments remain largely ineffective for solid cancers and require significant time and resources to be manufactured in an autologous setting. Developing alternative immune effector cells as cancer immunotherapy agents that can be employed in allogeneic settings is crucial for the advancement of cell therapy. Unlike T cells, Vα24-invariant natural killer T cells (NKTs) are not alloreactive and can therefore be generated from allogeneic donors for rapid infusion into numerous patients without the risk of graft-versus-host disease. Additionally, NKT cells demonstrate inherent advantages over T-cell products, including the ability to traffic to tumor tissues, target tumor-associated macrophages, transactivate NK cells, and cross-prime tumor-specific CD8 T cells. Both unmodified NKTs, which specifically recognize CD1d-bound glycolipid antigens expressed by certain types of tumors, and CAR-redirected NKTs are being developed as the next generation of allogeneic cell therapy products. In this review, we describe studies on the biology of NKTs and other types of innate-like T cells and summarize the clinical experiences of unmodified and CAR-redirected NKTs, including recent interim reports on allogeneic NKTs.

Characterization of the tumour microenvironment phenotypes in malignant tissues and pleural effusion from advanced osteoblastic osteosarcoma patients

PURPOSE

Malignant pleural effusion (MPE) is an adverse prognostic factor in patients with osteoblastic osteosarcoma; however, the cellular contexts of MPE are largely unknown.

EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN

We performed single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) on 27 260 cells from seven MPE samples and 91 186 cells from eight osteosarcoma tissues, including one recurrent, one lung metastasis and six primary tumour (PT) samples, to characterize their tumour microenvironment.

RESULTS

Thirteen main cell groups were identified in osteosarcoma tumour and MPE samples. Immune cells dominate the cellular contexts in MPE with more T/NK cells and less osteoclasts compared to PT samples. Of T/NK cells, CD8⁺ GNLY⁺ , CD8⁺ KLRC2⁺ T cells and FCGR3A⁺ NK cells were enriched in MPE but CD4⁺ FOXP3⁺ Tregs were enriched in PT samples. Naïve IGHD⁺ B and immune regulatory IGHA1⁺ B cells were largely identified in MPE, whereas bone metabolism-related CLEC11A⁺ B cells were significantly enriched in osteosarcoma PT. M2-type TAMs, including CLEC11A_TAM, C1QC_TAM and Prolif_TAMs, among myeloid cells were enriched in PT, which may suppress cytotoxicity activities of T cells through multiple ligand-receptor interactions. Mature LAMP3⁺ DCs were transformed from CD1C⁺ DC and CLEC9A⁺ DC sub-clusters when exposure to tumour alloantigens, which may improve T cell cytotoxicity activities on tumour cells under anti-PD-L1 treatments. In further, immune cells from MPE usually present up-regulated glycolysis and down-regulated oxidative phosphorylation and riboflavin metabolism activities compared to those in PT samples.

CONCLUSIONS

Our study provided a novel cellular atlas of MPE and PT in patients with advanced osteosarcoma, which may provide potential therapeutic targets in the future.

iNKT: A new avenue for CAR-based cancer immunotherapy

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell is a T lymphocyte-based immunotherapy, which achieves great successes in treating blood malignancies and provides new hope to cue advanced cancer patients. Invariant natural killer T (iNKT) cells are a kind of special T lymphocytes characterized by expressing invariant TCR of Vα24Vβ11 to recognize CD1d-presented glycolipid antigens, which bridge innate and adaptive immune responses. iNKT cells themselves show strong anti-tumor effect in tumor models via CD1d-mediated killing of CD1d-positive tumor cells and immunosuppressive TAMs and MDSCs, and are closely related to the prognosis of cancer patients. iNKT cells are not restricted to polymorphic human leukocyte antigen (HLA) and can prevent Graft versus Host Disease (GvHD), which makes it to be an ideal CAR vector for allogeneic therapy. Although CAR-iNKT was developed and verified by several different teams and attracts more and more attentions, many obstacles are still needed to be resolved before obtaining CAR-iNKT therapeutics. In this review, we summarized the current status of clinical application of iNKT cells and the latest achievements of CAR-iNKT cells, which provides new insight in CAR-iNKT development and usages.

CD2 Is a Novel Immune-Related Prognostic Biomarker of Invasive Breast Carcinoma That Modulates the Tumor Microenvironment

Female breast cancer (BCa) is the most commonly occurring cancer worldwide. The tumor microenvironment (TME) plays an essential role in tumor invasion, angiogenesis, unlimited proliferation, and even immune escape, but we know little about the TME of BCa. In this study, we aimed to find a TME-related biomarker for BCa, especially for invasive breast carcinoma (BRCA), that could predict prognosis and immunotherapy efficacy. Based on RNA-seq transcriptome data and the clinical characteristics of 1222 samples (113 normal and 1109 tumor samples) from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database, we used the ESTIMATE algorithm to calculate the ImmuneScore and StromalScore and then identified differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between the high and low ImmuneScore groups and the high and low StromalScore groups. Thereafter, a protein–protein interaction (PPI) network analysis and univariate Cox regression analyses of overall survival were used to identify potential key genes. Five candidate genes were identified, comprising CD2, CCL19, CD52, CD3E, and ITK. Thereafter, we focused on CD2, analyzing CD2 expression and its association with survival. CD2 expression was associated with tumor size (T stage) to some extent, but not with overall TNM stage, lymph node status (N stage), or distant metastasis (M stage). High CD2 expression was associated with longer survival. METABRIC data were used to validate the survival result (n = 276). Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) showed that the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathways that were significantly associated with high CD2 expression were mainly immune-related pathways. Furthermore, CD2 expression was correlated with 16 types of tumor-infiltrating immune cells (TICs). Hence, CD2 might be a novel biomarker in terms of molecular typing, and it may serve as a complementary approach to TNM staging to improve clinical outcome prediction for BCa patients.

Ex Vivo Expansion of Th2-Polarizing Immunotherapeutic iNKT Cells from Human Peripheral Blood

iNKT cells, classified as innate lymphocytes with invariant TCRs, have been highlighted as a putative, "off-the-shelf" cellular immunotherapeutic strategy for the treatment of malignant and nonmalignant diseases. However, their paucity in human blood limits their immunotherapeutic applications. Herein we describe a rigorously optimized 21-day ex vivo expansion method to achieve log-fold increases in immunotherapeutic human iNKT cells.