Abstract 2176: A cell mass-based platform for characterizing immune cell function and response to checkpoint blockade in primary blood and malignant fluid samples
Authors: Kimmerling Robert , Stevens Mark , Olcum Selim , Minnah Anthony , Vacha Madeleine , LaBella Rachel , Katsis Katie , Guo Audrey , Fujii Juanita , Shaheen Zayna , Sundaresan Srividya , Tamrazi Anobel , Reid Cliff 
Published: April 2023

Existing predictive biomarkers for immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) therapies that rely on characterization of tumor genomics or immunohistological assessment of the tumor microenvironment have demonstrated mixed success, with no single biomarker proving to be universally predictive of ICB treatment outcome. To complement these existing approaches, we present a workflow that relies on high-resolution single-cell mass measurements curated with CNN-based image classification to characterize T cell activation and functional response to treatment with ICB therapies. As a highly integrative measure of cellular phenotype, cell mass can be used as a label-free biomarker for characterizing immune cell function. For instance, upon activation with anti-CD3/CD28, T cells isolated from human PBMC showed a rapid and significant increase in cell mass. However, in T cells that had been repeatedly stimulated in vitro to generate a PD-1+ exhausted-like phenotype, this mass response to activation was blunted. We hypothesized that this variability in activation-induced mass response was the result of an altered balance of stimulatory and inhibitory “signal two” cues seen by the T cells. Consistent with this hypothesis, purified T cells stimulated with anti-CD3 alone (no co-stimulation) demonstrated a significantly smaller increase in cell mass when compared with those stimulated with both anti-CD3 and anti-CD28. Furthermore, the T cell response measured when unpurified PBMC were activated with anti-CD3 demonstrated an intermediate mass increase, suggesting contributions of both stimulatory and inhibitory signaling from other cells in the milieu. To explore how ICB treatment disrupts this co-stimulatory/inhibitory signaling balance, we measured T cell mass responses for samples treated with anti-CD3 alone or in combination with pembrolizumab, atezolizumab, nivolumab, or dostarlimab. These samples included PBMC isolated from blood and tumor/immune cell milieus isolated from malignant fluids (pleural effusions or abdominal ascites) collected from patients with advanced cancer. We found that T cells isolated from samples treated with both anti-CD3 and an ICB drug often showed a significantly greater mass increase than the same samples treated with anti-CD3 alone. This mass response showed significant heterogeneity across patients, with many samples showing no significant treatment effect. Despite all four of these therapies targeting ostensibly the same PD-1/PD-L1 signaling axis, we also found significant response heterogeneity to these different treatments within individual samples.These results suggest that mass response measurements capture biological heterogeneity associated with ICB response and may serve as a valuable complementary readout to existing biomarkers.

Citation Format: Robert Kimmerling, Mark Stevens, Selim Olcum, Anthony Minnah, Madeleine Vacha, Rachel LaBella, Katie Katsis, Audrey Guo, Juanita Fujii, Zayna Shaheen, Srividya Sundaresan, Anobel Tamrazi, Cliff Reid. A cell mass-based platform for characterizing immune cell function and response to checkpoint blockade in primary blood and malignant fluid samples [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2023; Part 1 (Regular and Invited Abstracts); 2023 Apr 14-19; Orlando, FL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2023;83(7_Suppl):Abstract nr 2176.