Project description:Although genomic instability can trigger cancer-intrinsic innate immune responses that promote tumor rejection, cancer cells often evade these responses by overexpressing immune checkpoint regulators, such as PD-L1. Here, we identify the SNF2-family DNA translocase SMARCAL1 as a factor that favors tumor immune evasion by a dual mechanism involving both the suppression of innate immune signaling and the induction of PD-L1-mediated immune checkpoint responses. Mechanistically, SMARCAL1 relieves endogenous DNA damage and suppresses cGAS-STING-dependent immune signaling during cancer cell growth. Simultaneously, it cooperates with the AP-1 family member JUN to maintain chromatin accessibility at a transcriptional regulatory element in the PD-L1 gene, thereby promoting PD-L1 expression in cancer cells. Loss of SMARCAL1 enhances anti-tumor immune responses and sensitizes tumors to immune checkpoint blockade in a mouse melanoma model. Collectively, these studies uncover SMARCAL1 as a valuable target for cancer immunotherapy.
Project description:Innate immune checkpoint has emerging as a highly potential target for cancer immunotherapy in recent years. The CD47-SIRPα axis is the best-studied innate checkpoint in cancer. However, the transcription profile of tumor cell duiring CD47-SIRPα blockade therapy remains unclear.
Project description:Checkpoint blockade immunotherapy is a promising strategy in cancer treatment, depending on a favorable preexisting tumor immune microenvironment. However, prostate cancer is usually considered as an immune “cold” tumor with the poor immunogenic response and low density of tumor-infiltrating immune cells. This research uses samples from prostate cancer patients showing that docetaxel-based chemohormonal therapy reprograms the immune microenvironment and increases tumor-infiltrating T cells. Mechanistically, docetaxel treatment activates the cGAS/STING pathway and induces the type I interferon signaling, which may boost T cell-mediated immune response. In a murine prostate cancer model, chemohormonal therapy sensitizes tumor-bearing mice to PD1-blockade therapy. These findings demonstrate that docetaxel-based chemohormonal therapy activates prostate cancer immunogenicity and acts cooperatively with anti-PD-1 checkpoint blockade, providing a combination immunotherapy strategy that would lead to better therapeutic benefit for prostate cancer.
Project description:Genomic instability can trigger cancer-intrinsic innate immune responses that promote tumor rejection. However, cancer cells often evade these responses by overexpressing immune checkpoint regulators, such as PD-L1. Here, we identify the SNF2-family DNA translocase SMARCAL1 as a factor that favors tumor immune evasion by a dual mechanism involving both the suppression of innate immune signaling and the induction of PD-L1-mediated immune checkpoint responses. Mechanistically, SMARCAL1 relieves endogenous DNA damage and suppresses cGAS-STING-dependent signaling during cancer cell growth. Simultaneously, it cooperates with the AP-1 family member JUN to maintain chromatin accessibility at a transcriptional regulatory element in the PD-L1 gene, thereby promoting PD-L1 expression in cancer cells. SMARCAL1 loss hinders the ability of tumor cells to induce PD-L1 in response to genomic instability, enhances anti-tumor immune responses and sensitizes tumors to immune checkpoint blockade in a mouse melanoma model. Collectively, these studies uncover SMARCAL1 as a promising target for cancer immunotherapy.
Project description:Genomic instability can trigger cancer-intrinsic innate immune responses that promote tumor rejection. However, cancer cells often evade these responses by overexpressing immune checkpoint regulators, such as PD-L1. Here, we identify the SNF2-family DNA translocase SMARCAL1 as a factor that favors tumor immune evasion by a dual mechanism involving both the suppression of innate immune signaling and the induction of PD-L1-mediated immune checkpoint responses. Mechanistically, SMARCAL1 relieves endogenous DNA damage and suppresses cGAS-STING-dependent signaling during cancer cell growth. Simultaneously, it cooperates with the AP-1 family member JUN to maintain chromatin accessibility at a transcriptional regulatory element in the PD-L1 gene, thereby promoting PD-L1 expression in cancer cells. SMARCAL1 loss hinders the ability of tumor cells to induce PD-L1 in response to genomic instability, enhances anti-tumor immune responses and sensitizes tumors to immune checkpoint blockade in a mouse melanoma model. Collectively, these studies uncover SMARCAL1 as a promising target for cancer immunotherapy.
Project description:Genomic instability can trigger cancer-intrinsic innate immune responses that promote tumor rejection. However, cancer cells often evade these responses by overexpressing immune checkpoint regulators, such as PD-L1. Here, we identify the SNF2-family DNA translocase SMARCAL1 as a factor that favors tumor immune evasion by a dual mechanism involving both the suppression of innate immune signaling and the induction of PD-L1-mediated immune checkpoint responses. Mechanistically, SMARCAL1 relieves endogenous DNA damage and suppresses cGAS-STING-dependent signaling during cancer cell growth. Simultaneously, it cooperates with the AP-1 family member JUN to maintain chromatin accessibility at a transcriptional regulatory element in the PD-L1 gene, thereby promoting PD-L1 expression in cancer cells. SMARCAL1 loss hinders the ability of tumor cells to induce PD-L1 in response to genomic instability, enhances anti-tumor immune responses and sensitizes tumors to immune checkpoint blockade in a mouse melanoma model. Collectively, these studies uncover SMARCAL1 as a promising target for cancer immunotherapy.
Project description:Single-agent immunotherapy, such as immune checkpoint inhibition, has shown remarkable efficacy in selected cancer entities and individual patients. However, most patients fail to respond. This is likely due to diverse immunosuppressive mechanisms acting in a concerted way to suppress the host anti-tumor immune response reducing the efficacy of single-agent immunotherapy. Combination immunotherapy approaches that are effective in such poorly immunogenic tumors mostly rely on precise knowledge of immunological targets on tumor cells by vaccinations or antibodies engineered to directly target those. Thus, creating a target-agnostic combination immunotherapy that is effective in poorly immunogenic tumors for which an immunological target is not known is a major challenge. We show that combined adoptive cellular therapy (ACT) with lymphokine-activated killer cells (LAKs), cytokine-induced killer cells (CIKs), Vγ9Vδ2-T-cells (γδ-T-cells) and adaptive, tumor-specific T-cells (CTLs) display synergistic anti-tumor treatment effects, which is further enhanced by co-treatment with anti-PD1 antibodies. Most strikingly, combination of this ACT with anti-PD1 antibodies, local immunotherapy of agonists against Toll-like receptor 3, 7 and 9 and pre-ACT lymphodepletion, a protocol we named TRI-IT, eradicates established, poorly immunogenic tumors and induces durable anti-tumor immunity in a variety of poorly immunogenic syngeneic, autochthonous, as well as autologous humanized patient-derived models. Mechanistically, we show that TRI-IT co-activates adaptive cellular and humoral, as well as innate anti-tumor immune responses to mediate its anti-tumor effect without inducing off-target toxicity. Our data demonstrate the efficacy of a target-agnostic combination immunotherapy that eradicates and potentially cures established poorly immunogenic tumors.
Project description:Antibiotic resistance is a major public health threat, and alternatives to antibiotic therapy are urgently needed. Immunotherapy, particularly the blockade of inhibitory immune checkpoints, is a leading treatment option in cancer and autoimmunity. In this study, we used a murine model of Salmonella Typhimurium infection to investigate whether immune checkpoint blockade could be applied to bacterial infection. We found that the immune checkpoint T-cell immunoglobulin and ITIM domain (TIGIT) was significantly upregulated on lymphocytes during infection, particularly on CD4+ T cells, drastically limiting their proinflammatory function. Blockade of TIGIT in vivo using monoclonal antibodies was able to enhance immunity and improve bacterial clearance. The efficacy of anti-TIGIT was dependent on the capacity of the antibody to bind to Fc (fragment crystallizable) receptors, giving important insights into the mechanism of anti-TIGIT therapy. This research suggests that targeting immune checkpoints, such as TIGIT, has the potential to enhance immune responses toward bacteria and restore antibacterial treatment options in the face of antibiotic resistance. In this experiment, we investigated the effect of TIGIT on CD4+ T cells by performing bulk RNA-sequencing on WT or TIGIT-/- CD4+ T cells in the context of S. Typhimurium infection.