Decoupled neoantigen cross-presentation by dendritic cells limits anti-tumor immunity against tumors with heterogeneous neoantigen expression
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States
Abstract
Cancer immunotherapies, in particular checkpoint blockade immunotherapy (CBT), can induce control of cancer growth, with a fraction of patients experiencing durable responses. However, the majority of patients currently do not respond to CBT and the molecular determinants of resistance have not been fully elucidated. Mounting clinical evidence suggests that the clonal status of neoantigens (NeoAg) impacts the anti-tumor T cell response. High intratumor heterogeneity (ITH), where the majority of NeoAgs are expressed subclonally, is correlated with poor clinical response to CBT and poor infiltration with tumor-reactive T cells. However, the mechanism by which ITH blunts tumor-reactive T cells is unclear. We developed a transplantable murine lung cancer model to characterize the immune response against a defined set of NeoAgs expressed either clonally or subclonally to model low or high ITH, respectively. Here we show that clonal expression of a weakly immunogenic NeoAg with a relatively strong NeoAg increased the immunogenicity of tumors with low but not high ITH. Mechanistically we determined that clonal NeoAg expression allowed cross-presenting dendritic cells to acquire and present both NeoAgs. Dual NeoAg presentation by dendritic cells was associated with a more mature DC phenotype and a higher stimulatory capacity. These data suggest that clonal NeoAg expression can induce more potent anti-tumor responses due to more stimulatory dendritic cell : T cell interactions. Therapeutic vaccination targeting subclonally expressed NeoAgs could be used to boost anti-tumor T cell responses.
Data availability
All raw data are uploaded as source data files.
Article and author information
Author details
Christopher J Copeland
Michael E Birnbaum
Funding
Melanoma Research Alliance
- Stefani Spranger
Lung Cancer Research Foundation
- Stefani Spranger
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 experimental animal procedures were approved by the Committee on Animal Care (CAC/IACUC) at MIT.
Copyright
© 2023, Nguyen 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
-
- 2,040
- views
-
- 304
- downloads
-
- 10
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Citations by DOI
-
- 10
- citations for umbrella DOI https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.85263
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)
Decoupled neoantigen cross-presentation by dendritic cells limits anti-tumor immunity against tumors with heterogeneous neoantigen expression
eLife 12:e85263.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.85263
