Cancer vaccine based on a combination of an infection-enhanced adenoviral vector and pro-inflammatory allogeneic DCs leads to sustained antigen-specific immune responses in three melanoma models

Autologous patient-derived dendritic cells (DCs) modified ex vivo to present tumor-associated antigens (TAAs) are frequently used as cancer vaccines. However, apart from the stringent logistics in producing DCs on a patient basis, accumulating evidence indicate that ex vivo engineered DCs are poor in migration and in fact do not directly present TAA epitopes to naïve T cells in vivo. Instead, it is proposed that bystander host DCs take up material from vaccine-DCs, migrate and subsequently initiate antitumor T-cell responses. We used mouse models to examine the possibility of using pro-inflammatory allogeneic DCs (alloDCs) to activate host DCs and enable them to promote antigen-specific T-cell immunity. We found that alloDCs were able to initiate host DC activation and migration to draining lymph node leading to T-cell activation. The pro-inflammatory milieu created by alloDCs also led to recruitment of NK cells and neutrophils at the site of injection. Vaccination with alloDCs combined with Ad5M(gp100), an infection-enhanced adenovirus encoding the human melanoma-associated antigen gp100 resulted in generation of CD8(+) T cells with a T-cell receptor (TCR) specific for the gp100(25-33) epitope (gp100-TCR(+)). Ad5M(gp100)-alloDC vaccination in combination with transfer of gp100-specific pmel-1 T cells resulted in prolonged survival of B16-F10 melanoma-bearing mice and altered the composition of the tumor microenvironment (TME). We hereby propose that alloDCs together with TAA- or neoepitope-encoding Ad5M can become an “off-the-shelf” cancer vaccine, which can reverse the TME-induced immunosuppression and induce host cellular anti-tumor immune responses in patients without the need of a time-consuming preparation step of autologous DCs.