Abstract
The immune system adapts to constitutive antigens to preserve self-tolerance, which is a major barrier for anti-tumor immunity. Antigen-specific reversal of tolerance constitutes a major goal to spur therapeutic applications. Here, we show that robust, iterative, systemic stimulation targeting tissue-specific antigens in the context of acute infections reverses established CD8+ T cell tolerance to self, including in T cells that survive negative selection. This strategy results in large numbers of circulating and resident memory self-specific CD8+ T cells that are widely distributed and can be co-opted to control established malignancies bearing self-antigen without concomitant autoimmunity. Targeted expansion of both self- and tumor neoantigen-specific T cells acts synergistically to boost anti-tumor immunity and elicits protection against aggressive melanoma. Our findings demonstrate that T cell tolerance can be re-adapted to responsiveness through robust antigenic exposure, generating self-specific CD8+ T cells that can be used for cancer treatment.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 3092-3104.e5 |
Journal | Cell reports |
Volume | 28 |
Issue number | 12 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Sep 17 2019 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2019 The Author(s)
Keywords
- CD8 T cell
- cancer
- dysfunction
- exhaustion
- neo-antigen
- resident memory
- reversal
- self-antigen
- tolerance
- vaccination