Abstract 1516: Deep profiling of T-cell repertoire and tumor heterogeneity in chronic lymphocytic leukemia patients following allogeneic T-cell therapy
Authors: Kerros Celine , Miller John P. , Mao Xizeng , Garber Haven R. , Beird Hannah C. , Zhang Jianhua , Roszik Jason , Leonard Paul , Zhao Li , Seth Sahil , Lin Pei , Sun Huandong , Wierda William G. , Khouri Issa F. , Clise-Dwyer Karen , Futreal Andrew , Liang Shoudan , Priya Koppikar , Molldrem Jeffrey 
Published: September 2020

Chemotherapy/ targeted therapy are both known to trigger evolution of treatment resistant clones that can lead to relapse. Allogeneic stem cell transplant (alloSCT) for refractory Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL) patients is associated with better outcomes. We hypothesized that allogeneic T-cell immunotherapies, including alloSCT and donor lymphocyte infusion (DLI) would impact tumor evolution through the application of selective immunologic pressure with reciprocal changes in the T-cell compartment. Here, we tested a cohort of 24 heavily pre-treated CLL patients treated. Treatments consisted of alloSCT alone, or with follow-up DLI, which are two established mediators of effective Graft versus Leukemia (GVL). Our cohort included 11 patients who relapsed (denoted as non-responder, NR) after alloSCT and 13 patients who had complete response (CR) after alloSCT, with 11/13 patients showing durable CR with a median post-transplant overall survival (OS) of 9.8 years. We mapped the evolutionary trajectories of tumor cells by whole exome sequencing (WES) of sort purified CLL in post-transplant relapsed patients. To investigate changes in immune repertoire and gene expression post-transplant, CD3 positive T-cells from peripheral blood and bone marrows of CLL patients at complete donor chimerism were analyzed both at bulk and at the single cell level. We found evidence of subclonal leukemic evolution in the majority of our CLL patient cohort after nonmyeloablative HLA-matched alloSCT. Different patterns of CLL evolution were observed, and these changes included putative CLL drivers in every case. In all of the 11 patients with longitudinal post-alloSCT samples available, we observed branched CLL evolution in 4 patients, linear evolution in 4 patients, and no evolution in 3 patients. These data suggest that differential sensitivity of leukemic subclones to allogeneic T cell killing may underlie the branched and linear evolution that we observed, and therefore can shape leukemic subclonal architecture after transplant. Of note, we found that clonal CLL was more responsive to alloSCT in comparison to CLL with subclonal disease architecture.To identify T-cells with GVL potential, we first cataloged potential neoantigens by screening mutated regions in CLL with in silico HLA binding prediction models. Neoantigen specific T-cells were then sorted from longitudinal peripheral blood samples using tetramers, followed by identification of GVL specific TCR in both bulk and single cell setting. We were able to identify T-cells that coevolved with specific tumorigenic lesions in a subset of CLL patients. Taken together, our results suggest that donor-derived antigen-specific T-cells mediate clonal selection of CLL with concurrent changes in allogeneic T-cells, and that these changes can be monitored in longitudinal patient samples.

Citation Format: Celine Kerros, John P. Miller, Xizeng Mao, Haven R. Garber, Hannah C. Beird, Jianhua Zhang, Jason Roszik, Paul Leonard, Li Zhao, Sahil Seth, Pei Lin, Huandong Sun, William G. Wierda, Issa F. Khouri, Karen Clise-Dwyer, Andrew Futreal, Shoudan Liang, Koppikar Priya, Jeffrey Molldrem. Deep profiling of T-cell repertoire and tumor heterogeneity in chronic lymphocytic leukemia patients following allogeneic T-cell therapy [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research 2020; 2020 Apr 27-28 and Jun 22-24. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2020;80(16 Suppl):Abstract nr 1516.