Melanoma Cancer Immunotherapy Using PD-L1 siRNA and Imatinib Promotes Cancer-Immunity Cycle

Cancer-Immunity Cycle is a cascade of anticancer immune responses in the body that continues and fights against the cancer expansion. The Cancer-Immunity Cycle is halted by tumor cell immunosuppression of host T cell through programmed cell death receptor 1 (PD-1) and programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1) interactions that induce the functional suppression of tumor-reactive cytotoxic T cells and actively promotes the tumorigenesis via the mTOR signaling pathway.

Here, we demonstrated that this Cycle could be enhanced by the synergistic knock down of PD-L1 through co-delivery of siRNA-PD-L1 (siPD-L1) and imatinib (IMT) in a liposomal nanoparticle.

The siPDIN effectively downregulated the protein expressions of PD-L1 and significantly knocked down the expression of p-S6k protein at in vitro and in vivo conditions which inhibited tumorigenic mTOR pathway. The combination-based siPDIN exhibited a significantly higher cytotoxic effect compared to that of individual anticancer agents. B16F10 cells treated with siPDIN exhibited a significantly higher cancer cell apoptosis (~60%) compared to cocktail combination of siRNA+IMT (~35%) analyzed by flow cytometer. Importantly, siPDIN significantly delayed the tumor growth with significantly lower tumor-specific growth rate than the animals treated with individual free IMT or siRNA. siPDIN produced a 3-fold higher IFN-γ compared to control in DLNs and 4-fold higher IFN-γ in spleens.

Overall, results revealed that the tumors treated with siPDIN restored the immunity of CTLs by potentially inhibiting the immune checkpoint interactions, suppressed the mTOR signaling pathway and exhibited an enhanced anticancer efficacy in melanoma.