Abstract PR015: Sepsis-induced inflammation alters natural killer cell-mediated surveillance of liver metastasis
Authors: Sivetz Nicole , Cunniff Patrick J. , Vakoc Christopher R. , Beyaz Semir , Egeblad Mikala 
Published: November 2024

A majority of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) patients who undergo surgery for primary tumor resection will develop lethal metastases, despite having no evidence of metastasis at the time of their initial diagnosis. Liver metastases constitute nearly half of recurrences detected within the first six months following PDAC resection. Several clinical and experimental studies provide evidence that perioperative inflammation, including infectious complications like sepsis, positively correlates with liver metastasis across several malignancies. Despite these observations, it is still unknown whether there is a causal link between perioperative inflammation and PDAC liver metastasis. To gain mechanistic insight into the regulation of PDAC liver metastasis in the context of perioperative inflammation, we established mouse models that combine experimental PDAC liver metastasis with either the cecal ligation and puncture (CLP) model of polymicrobial sepsis or the lipopolysaccharide (LPS) model of acute sterile endotoxemia. Mice challenged with CLP prior to seeding PDAC cells in the liver had increased metastatic burden at endpoint compared to sham laparotomy controls. In contrast, mice challenged with LPS prior to PDAC cell seeding had reduced metastatic burden at endpoint compared to PBS-injected controls. We hypothesized that these opposing pro- and anti-metastatic effects of CLP and LPS, respectively, were due to qualitatively distinct inflammatory responses elicited in the liver. Our profiling of the host response to either CLP or LPS revealed shared systemic changes, including activation of the acute-phase protein response. However, LPS-associated inflammation uniquely upregulated a distinct set of interferon-regulated genes in the liver important for modifying immune cell activity (i.e., Ccl2, Ccl5, Cxcl9, Cxcl10). Accordingly, immunostaining and flow cytometry of the liver revealed that LPS uniquely increased the abundance of activated natural killer (NK) cells and MPO+ myeloid cells. We utilized Tlr4 -/- mice, which lack the primary receptor for LPS, to determine that the anti-metastatic effect of LPS required a host-facilitated response downstream of TLR4-mediated signaling. Through a series of genetic models and short-term depletion experiments, we determined that NK cells restrict PDAC cell seeding and outgrowth in our experimental liver metastasis model, and that this protective effect is further enhanced by activation of type-I interferon signaling in the host. Our findings confirm prior work identifying NK cell-mediated surveillance of disseminated cancer cells as an important mechanism in protecting against liver metastasis and show sterile endotoxemia and its associated inflammation establish a protective ‘anti-metastatic niche’ marked by enhanced NK cell activity. Further insights into the establishment of this niche may reveal potential therapeutic strategies to reduce the incidence of liver metastasis among resected PDAC patients.

Citation Format: Nicole Sivetz, Patrick J. Cunniff, Christopher R. Vakoc, Semir Beyaz, Mikala Egeblad. Sepsis-induced inflammation alters natural killer cell-mediated surveillance of liver metastasis [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the AACR Special Conference in Cancer Research: Tumor-body Interactions: The Roles of Micro- and Macroenvironment in Cancer; 2024 Nov 17-20; Boston, MA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2024;84(22_Suppl):Abstract nr PR015.