Defining the Critical Valency of Peptide-MHC on Nanoscale Artificial Antigen Presenting Cells for Expanding Endogenous Tumor-Specific T-cells .

Expanding tumor antigen-specific T-cells remains a major challenge in developing effective cancer immunotherapeutics. Artificial antigen-presenting cells (aAPCs) have the potential to overcome this challenge, but formulating aAPCs without correlating the dynamics of T-cell expansion often leads to suboptimal T-cell responses. Here, we have defined the critical effect of the peptide-major histocompatibility complex (p-MHC) valency displayed along with co-stimulatory molecules on iron-oxide nanoparticle-based aAPCs and demonstrated that the functionality of these aAPCs is governed by the p-MHC valency.

Inhibition of Melanoma Growth by Ex Vivo Expanded Tumor-Specific CD8+ T Cells Is Dependent on the Configuration of Nanoscale Artificial APCs.

Adoptive T-cell therapy is an emerging immunotherapeutic strategy for treating cancer, but the compromised quality of CD8+ T-cells limits the therapeutic efficacy. Traditional methods involving polyclonal expansion of CD8+ T-cells mainly prioritize yielding a high quantity of CD8+ T-cells. However, the antigen-specificity of ex vivo expanded CD8+ T-cells and the ability to produce cytolytic molecules are the two critical determinants of therapeutic efficacy that remain poorly studied.