Gene therapy to improve function of T cells for adoptive immunotherapy

Adoptive immunotherapy with cytotoxic T cells has shown promising clinical results in patients with metastatic melanoma and post-transplant-associated viral infections. However, the antitumor effect of adoptively transferred tumor-specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) is impaired by the limited capacity of these cells to expand within the tumor microenvironment. Administration of interleukin 2 (IL-2) has been used to overcome this limitation, but the systemic toxicity and the expansion of unwanted cells, including regulatory T cells, limit the clinical value of this strategy. To discover whether transgenic expression of lymphokines by the CTLs themselves might overcome these limitations, we evaluated the effects of transgenic expression of IL-2 and IL-15 in our model of Epstein-Barr Virus-specific CTLs (EBV-CTLs). We found that transgenic expression of IL-2 or IL-15 increased the expansion of EBV-CTLs in vitro and that these gene-modified EBV-CTL had enhanced antitumor activity, while maintaining their antigen-specificity. Although the proliferation of these cytokine gene transduced CTLs remained strictly antigen dependent, clinical application of this approach likely requires the inclusion of a suicide gene to deal with the potential development of T-cell mutants with autonomous growth. We found that the incorporation of an inducible caspase-9 suicide gene allowed efficient elimination of transgenic CTLs after exposure to a chemical inducer of dimerization, thereby increasing the safety and feasibility of the approach.