Abstract A003: High-throughput TCR sequencing demonstrates induction of long-lasting HPV16-specific T cell responses in VB10.16 vaccinated advanced cervical cancer patients
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background: Assessment of vaccine-induced T cell responses is a primary pharmacodynamic readout in cancer vaccine clinical trials. High-throughput sequencing of T cell receptors (TCRs) is emerging as a rapid and scalable method, suitable for late-stage clinical trials, and offers sensitive and accurate quantification of the full T cell repertoire. Here we performed ELISpot and TCR sequencing on serial peripheral blood mononuclear cell (PBMC) samples from a clinical phase 2 trial investigating the therapeutic HPV16 cancer vaccine VB10.16 in combination with atezolizumab in advanced cervical cancer patients (NCT04405349). Methods: T cell responses were assessed by ex vivo IFN-g ELISpot (n=36). Immunosequencing of the TCRB locus was performed in 10 patients with available PBMCs, representing clinical response, stable disease, and progressive disease as best overall response. Immunosequencing of PBMC-derived gDNA was performed on up to five timepoints per patient, ranging from week 10 to 52. Novel and expanded clones from baseline to on-treatment timepoints were determined by a differential abundance framework, using binomial models in pair-wise comparisons, enabling longitudinal tracking of significantly expanded T cell clones. The sequences were matched and annotated to HPV16-specific TCRs present in a proprietary database of confirmed HLA class I HPV16-specific T cell clones; the database was constructed from querying the T cell repertoires of 92 healthy donors with 146 peptides derived from HPV16 E6 and E7 in MIRA assay. Results: An increased T cell response was significantly associated with disease control assessed by RECIST1.1 (n=24 patients with disease control vs n=12 patients with progressive disease, p=0.0113) and patients with a >2-fold increase measured by ex vivo IFN-g ELISpot showed a numerically improved progression-free survival (8 vs 3.7 months median PFS). The longitudinal tracking of TCRs provided a detailed insight into the dynamics of the overall TCR repertoire during treatment. Expansion of both pre-existing and newly expanded T cell clones was observed from week 10 and persisted until the end of treatment. Despite the non-exhaustive database, at least one verified HPV16-specific CD8 T cell clone was expanded in 8 out of 10 patients, supporting that the clonotypic expansion is caused by VB10.16. In 5 out of 7 patients with disease control, the breadth of HPV16-specific TCRs increased after vaccination, demonstrating induction of clinically relevant T cell responses. Conclusions: We demonstrate induction of strong and long-lasting HPV16-specific T cell responses after treatment with VB10.16 and atezolizumab in advanced cervical cancer patients. Induction of HPV16-specific T cell responses was significantly correlated with clinical efficacy. Immunosequencing and HPV16-specific annotation allowed longitudinal tracking of expanded TCRs and demonstrated a potential clinical relevance of increased repertoire diversity of HPV16-specific CD8 T cells in patients. Citation Format: Kaja C G Berg, Paula Bousquet, Milena Blaga, Thomas Bello, Mohammad Arabpour, Mikkel W Pedersen, Karoline Schjetne. High-throughput TCR sequencing demonstrates induction of long-lasting HPV16-specific T cell responses in VB10.16 vaccinated advanced cervical cancer patients [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the AACR Special Conference in Cancer Research: Tumor Immunology and Immunotherapy; 2023 Oct 1-4; Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Immunol Res 2023;11(12 Suppl):Abstract nr A003.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".