HLA-DPB1 Reactive T Cell Receptors for Adoptive Immunotherapy in Allogeneic Stem Cell Transplantation

HLA-DPB1 antigens are mismatched in about 80% of allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantations from HLA 10/10 matched unrelated donors and were shown to be associated with a decreased risk of leukemia relapse. We recently developed a reliable in vitro method to generate HLA-DPB1 mismatch-reactive CD4 T-cell clones from allogeneic donors. Here, we isolated HLA-DPB1 specific T cell receptors (TCR DP) and used them either as wild-type or genetically optimized receptors to analyze in detail the reactivity of transduced CD4 and CD8 T cells toward primary AML blasts. While both CD4 and CD8 T cells showed strong AML reactivity in vitro, only CD4 T cells were able to effectively eliminate leukemia blasts in AML engrafted NOD/SCID/IL2Rγc(−/−) (NSG) mice. Further analysis showed that optimized TCR DP and under some conditions wild-type TCR DP also mediated reactivity to non-hematopoietic cells like fibroblasts or tumor cell lines after HLA-DP upregulation. In conclusion, T cells engineered with selected allo-HLA-DPB1 specific TCRs might be powerful off-the-shelf reagents in allogeneic T-cell therapy of leukemia. However, because of frequent (common) cross-reactivity to non-hematopoietic cells with optimized TCR DP T cells, safety mechanisms are mandatory.