Cellular therapy: Adoptive immunotherapy with expanded natural killer cells

Adoptive immunotherapy with natural killer cells was pioneered 30 years ago in human clinical trials with the development of cytokine-induced killer cells-unfractionated peripheral blood mononuclear cell (PBMC) populations activated overnight with IL-2. Higher doses were subsequently made possible through the advent of steady-state apheresis, allowing the collection of PBMC numbers equivalent to an entire adult blood volume, and increased purity made feasible through magnetic CD3-depletion and/or CD56-selection methods. Still, these approaches rarely achieved clinical dosing above a single infusion of 10⁸ NK cells/kg, except with substantial donor-recipient size mismatch (eg, parents donating cells to children). To address this shortcoming, leukemia cell lines with NK cell-like function or ex vivo expansion approaches centered on the homeostatic cytokine IL-15 were developed. Here, we describe the development of an ex vivo expansion system based on a feeder cell expressing membrane-bound IL-21 that enables log-phase growth of primary NK cells for many weeks without inducing senescence, and describe the biology, correlative science, and translation to clinical trials for patients with leukemia, brain tumors, and solid tumors.