Tumor stiffening reversion through collagen crosslinking inhibition improves T cell migration and anti-PD-1 treatment
- INSERM, France
- INSERM U1016, France
- Institut Cochin - Inserm U1016-CNRS UMR8104-Université Paris Descartes, France
- CRRET laboratory, France
- Medical University of Białystok, Poland
- Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland
- Université de Paris, France
Abstract
Only a fraction of cancer patients benefits from immune checkpoint inhibitors. This may be partly due to the dense extracellular matrix (ECM) that forms a barrier for T cells. Comparing 5 preclinical mouse tumor models with heterogeneous tumor microenvironments, we aimed to relate the rate of tumor stiffening with the remodeling of ECM architecture and to determine how these features affect intratumoral T cell migration. An ECM-targeted strategy, based on the inhibition of lysyl oxidase (LOX) was used. In vivo stiffness measurements were found to be strongly correlated with tumor growth and ECM crosslinking but negatively correlated with T cell migration. Interfering with collagen stabilization reduces ECM content and tumor stiffness leading to improved T cell migration and increased efficacy of anti-PD-1 blockade. This study highlights the rationale of mechanical characterizations in solid tumors to understand resistance to immunotherapy and of combining treatment strategies targeting the ECM with anti-PD-1 therapy.
Data availability
Relevant source data for all figures and supplement figures have been uploaded as Excel files.
Article and author information
Author details
Emmanuel Donnadieu
Funding
Ligue Contre le Cancer (Equipe labellisée)
- Alba Nicolas-Boluda
- Lene Vimeux
- Sarah Barrin
- Chahrazade Kantari-Mimoun
- Emmanuel Donnadieu
Institut National Du Cancer (Program HTE)
- Alba Nicolas-Boluda
- Lene Vimeux
- Sarah Barrin
- Chahrazade Kantari-Mimoun
- Emmanuel Donnadieu
European Commission (685795)
- Florence Gazeau
Agence Nationale de la Recherche (11-IDEX-0004-02)
- Javier Vaquero
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All animal experiments were performed in agreement with institutional animal use and care regulations after approval by the animal experimentation ethics committee of Paris Descartes University (CEEA 34, 16-063).
Copyright
© 2021, Nicolas-Boluda et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 7,313
- views
-
- 1,181
- downloads
-
- 183
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Tumor stiffening reversion through collagen crosslinking inhibition improves T cell migration and anti-PD-1 treatment
eLife 10:e58688.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.58688
Further reading
-
- Cancer Biology
- Computational and Systems Biology
Effects from aging in single cells are heterogenous, whereas at the organ- and tissue-levels aging phenotypes tend to appear as stereotypical changes. The mammary epithelium is a bilayer of two major phenotypically and functionally distinct cell lineages: luminal epithelial and myoepithelial cells. Mammary luminal epithelia exhibit substantial stereotypical changes with age that merit attention because these cells are the putative cells-of-origin for breast cancers. We hypothesize that effects from aging that impinge upon maintenance of lineage fidelity increase susceptibility to cancer initiation. We generated and analyzed transcriptomes from primary luminal epithelial and myoepithelial cells from younger <30 (y)ears old and older >55 y women. In addition to age-dependent directional changes in gene expression, we observed increased transcriptional variance with age that contributed to genome-wide loss of lineage fidelity. Age-dependent variant responses were common to both lineages, whereas directional changes were almost exclusively detected in luminal epithelia and involved altered regulation of chromatin and genome organizers such as SATB1. Epithelial expression variance of gap junction protein GJB6 increased with age, and modulation of GJB6 expression in heterochronous co-cultures revealed that it provided a communication conduit from myoepithelial cells that drove directional change in luminal cells. Age-dependent luminal transcriptomes comprised a prominent signal that could be detected in bulk tissue during aging and transition into cancers. A machine learning classifier based on luminal-specific aging distinguished normal from cancer tissue and was highly predictive of breast cancer subtype. We speculate that luminal epithelia are the ultimate site of integration of the variant responses to aging in their surrounding tissue, and that their emergent phenotype both endows cells with the ability to become cancer-cells-of-origin and represents a biosensor that presages cancer susceptibility.
-
- Cancer Biology
Chemotherapy is widely used to treat lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) patients comprehensively. Considering the limitations of chemotherapy due to drug resistance and other issues, it is crucial to explore the impact of chemotherapy and immunotherapy on these aspects. In this study, tumor samples from nine LUAD patients, of which four only received surgery and five received neoadjuvant chemotherapy, were subjected to scRNA-seq analysis. In vitro and in vivo assays, including flow cytometry, immunofluorescence, Seahorse assay, and tumor xenograft models, were carried out to validate our findings. A total of 83,622 cells were enrolled for subsequent analyses. The composition of cell types exhibited high heterogeneity across different groups. Functional enrichment analysis revealed that chemotherapy drove significant metabolic reprogramming in tumor cells and macrophages. We identified two subtypes of macrophages: Anti-mac cells (CD45+CD11b+CD86+) and Pro-mac cells (CD45+CD11b+ARG +) and sorted them by flow cytometry. The proportion of Pro-mac cells in LUAD tissues increased significantly after neoadjuvant chemotherapy. Pro-mac cells promote tumor growth and angiogenesis and also suppress tumor immunity. Moreover, by analyzing the remodeling of T and B cells induced by neoadjuvant therapy, we noted that chemotherapy ignited a relatively more robust immune cytotoxic response toward tumor cells. Our study demonstrates that chemotherapy induces metabolic reprogramming within the tumor microenvironment of LUAD, particularly affecting the function and composition of immune cells such as macrophages and T cells. We believe our findings will offer insight into the mechanisms of drug resistance and provide novel therapeutic targets for LUAD in the future.
