Innate immune activation by checkpoint inhibition in human patient-derived lung cancer tissues
Abstract
Although Pembrolizumab-based immunotherapy has significantly improved lung cancer patient survival, many patients show variable efficacy and resistance development. A better understanding of the drug's action is needed to improve patient outcomes. Functional heterogeneity of the tumor microenvironment (TME) is crucial to modulating drug resistance; understanding of individual patients' TME that impacts drug response is hampered by lack of appropriate models. Lung organotypic tissue slice cultures (OTC) with patients' native TME procured from primary and brain-metastasized (BM) non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients were treated with Pembrolizumab and/or beta-glucan (WGP, an innate immune activator). Metabolic tracing with 13C6-Glc/13C5,15N2-Gln, multiplex immunofluorescence (mIF), and digital spatial profiling (DSP) were employed to interrogate metabolic and functional responses to Pembrolizumab and/or WGP. Primary and BM PD-1+ lung cancer OTC responded to Pembrolizumab and Pembrolizumab + WGP treatments, respectively. Pembrolizumab activated innate immune metabolism and functions in primary OTC, which were accompanied by tissue damage. DSP analysis indicated an overall decrease in immunosuppressive macrophages and T cells but revealed microheterogeneity in immune responses and tissue damage. Two TMEs with altered cancer cell properties showed resistance. Pembrolizumab or WGP alone had negligible effects on BM-lung cancer OTC but Pembrolizumab + WGP blocked central metabolism with increased pro-inflammatory effector release and tissue damage. In depth metabolic analysis and multiplex TME imaging of lung cancer OTC demonstrated overall innate immune activation by Pembrolizumab but heterogeneous responses in the native TME of a patient with primary NSCLC. Metabolic and functional analysis also revealed synergistic action of Pembrolizumab and WGP in OTC of metastatic NSCLC.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files. Excel spreadsheets of data used for tables and figures will be deposited at Dryad.
-
data from: Innate immune activation by checkpoint inhibition in patient-derived lung cancer tissuesDryad Digital Repository, doi:10.5061/dryad.n5tb2rbwc.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Fabio Malavasi, University of Torino Medical School, Italy
Ethics
Human subjects: Surgical patients were consented for freshly resected tissue specimens under the approved IRB protocol (14-0288-F6A; 13-LUN-94-MCC) of the University of Kentucky (UKy).
Version history
- Received: April 20, 2021
- Accepted: July 26, 2021
- Accepted Manuscript published: August 18, 2021 (version 1)
- Accepted Manuscript updated: August 20, 2021 (version 2)
- Accepted Manuscript updated: August 31, 2021 (version 3)
- Version of Record published: September 27, 2021 (version 4)
Copyright
© 2021, Fan 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
-
- 1,304
- views
-
- 201
- downloads
-
- 17
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
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)
Further reading
-
- Cancer Biology
Certain bacteria demonstrate the ability to target and colonize the tumor microenvironment, a characteristic that positions them as innovative carriers for delivering various therapeutic agents in cancer therapy. Nevertheless, our understanding of how bacteria adapt their physiological condition to the tumor microenvironment remains elusive. In this work, we employed liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry to examine the proteome of E. coli colonized in murine tumors. Compared to E. coli cultivated in the rich medium, we found that E. coli colonized in tumors notably upregulated the processes related to ferric ions, including the enterobactin biosynthesis and iron homeostasis. This finding indicated that the tumor is an iron-deficient environment to E. coli. We also found that the colonization of E. coli in the tumor led to an increased expression of lipocalin 2 (LCN2), a host protein that can sequester the enterobactin. We therefore engineered E. coli in order to evade the nutritional immunity provided by LCN2. By introducing the IroA cluster, the E. coli synthesizes the glycosylated enterobactin, which creates steric hindrance to avoid the LCN2 sequestration. The IroA-E. coli showed enhanced resistance to LCN2 and significantly improved the anti-tumor activity in mice. Moreover, the mice cured by the IroA-E. coli treatment became resistant to the tumor re-challenge, indicating the establishment of immunological memory. Overall, our study underscores the crucial role of bacteria’s ability to acquire ferric ions within the tumor microenvironment for effective cancer therapy.
-
- Cancer Biology
- Cell Biology
Mutations in the gene for β-catenin cause liver cancer cells to release fewer exosomes, which reduces the number of immune cells infiltrating the tumor.