IDO and galectin-3 hamper the ex vivo generation of clinical grade tumor-specific T cells for adoptive cell therapy in metastatic melanoma

Adoptive T cell transfer (ACT) with ex vivo-expanded tumor-reactive T cells proved to be successful for the treatment of metastatic melanoma patients. Mixed lymphocyte tumor cell cultures (MLTC) can be used to generate tumor-specific T cells for ACT; however, in a number of cases tumor-reactive T cell, expansion is far from optimal. We hypothesized that this is due to tumor intrinsic and extrinsic factors and aimed to identify and manipulate these factors so to optimize our clinical, GMP-compliant MLTC protocol. We found that the tumor cell produced IDO and/or galectin-3, and the accumulation of CD4+CD25hiFoxP3+ T cells suppressed the expansion of tumor-specific T cells in the MLTC. Strategies to eliminate CD4+CD25hiFoxP3+ T cells during culture required the depletion of the whole CD4+ T cell population and were found to be undesirable. Blocking of IDO and galectin-3 was feasible and resulted in improved efficiency of the MLTC. Implementation of these findings in clinical protocols for ex vivo expansion of tumor-reactive T cells holds promise for an increased therapeutic potential of adoptive cell transfer treatments with tumor-specific T cells. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00262-017-1995-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.