Ludwig Cancer Research researchers have devised an efficient method to generate large numbers of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) specifically engineered to recognize neoantigens and destroy the tumors that express them. According to the team, the method, named NeoScreen, significantly improves the identification of a patient’s neoantigens and consequently holds considerable promise for the development of personalized immunotherapies for cancer.
“We wanted to develop a better way to both identify the neoantigens uniquely expressed by a patient’s tumors and efficiently isolate and expand the immune cells—tumor-infiltrating T cells, or TILs—that are spontaneously directed against them, since it is these rare cells that are considered to be best at destroying cancer cells,” said Alexandre Harari , senior author of the study published in Nature Biotechnology. “NeoScreen allows us to do all that. Better yet, it permits the identification of the specific receptors these T cells use to recognize neoantigens so that we can equip other T cells from a patient’s blood with that machinery and use those cells as well for personalized immunotherapy.”
To identify neoantigens and culture the T cells that detect them, researchers ordinarily isolate TILs from a tumor and grow them with that tumor’s constituent cells in the presence of immune factors that stimulate T cell proliferation. But because neoantigen-specific TILs are very rare, the wholesale stimulation of T cell growth often results in the far larger expansion of T cells that are not specifically targeted to neoantigens. This can drown out the most desirable neoantigen-targeting T cells in such cultures.
To address this limitation, the team first modified the company in which isolated TILs are cultured, adding antigen presenting cells (APCs) into the mix. But instead of using typical APCs, like dendritic cells, the researchers engineered the B cell, to be a highly efficient antigen presenting cell.
The researchers then used computational methods to analyze the genome of tumor cells and identify randomly mutated parts of proteins that could be presented as neoantigens. Next, they pulsed the engineered B cells with those protein fragments—or inserted DNA encoding the fragments into the B cells—to get them to present the antigens. Finally, they cultured the B cells with tumor cells and the TILs isolated from that tumor.
Because antigen recognition stimulates T cell proliferation, this co-culture had the effect of selectively and rather dramatically expanding the TILs that recognize neoantigens expressed by the tumor. The researchers isolated those TILs, identified which of the neoantigens they recognized and sequenced the genes encoding their neoantigen-detecting T cell receptors (TCRs). This approach resulted in the identification of a far greater variety of both expressed neoantigens and TCRs than did the conventional method.