The contributors Christian U. Blank is a medical oncologist and principal investigator at the Netherlands Cancer Institute. He is Professor of Haematology/oncology at the university of Regensburg, Germany, and received an MBA degree from the university of Warwick, UK. His research interests include neoadjuvant immunotherapies, targeted and biological response modifiers, and prognostic markers for cancer immunotherapies. W. Nicholas Haining is a physician-scientist and vice-President for Discovery oncology and Immunology at Merck Research Laboratories. His former academic laboratory at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute focused on understanding the transcriptional control of T cell exhaustion and on identifying regulators of the immune response to cancer in tumour and immune cells. Werner Held's laboratory has a long-standing interest in understanding the development, differentiation and function of natural killer cells and CD8 + T cells. Current work focuses on CD8 + T cell differentiation in response to acute and chronic infections as well as cancer. Patrick G. Hogan's research centres on mechanisms and regulation of cellular calcium signalling, the biology of the nuclear factor of activated T cells (NFAT) family of transcription factors and the transcriptional control of immune cell development and function. Axel Kallies is a professor at the University of Melbourne, Australia. His laboratory studies the molecular control of CD8 + cytotoxic T cell and regulatory T cell differentiation with a focus on populations residing in non-lymphoid tissue, including healthy tissues and tumours. The Kallies laboratory has developed and applied genetic and molecular approaches to this field, including novel gene reporters, metabolic techniques, transcriptional profiling, chromatin immunoprecipitation and accessible chromatin sequencing. Enrico Lugli's laboratory is focused on understanding the biological mechanisms at the basis of memory T cell responses and homeostasis in humans and how this information can be exploited to favour antitumour immune responses in patients with cancer. The group is specialized in single-cell technologies, in particular high-dimensional flow cytometry. Rachel C. Lynn is an associate director of research at Lyell Immunopharma. She received her PhD degree from the the university of Pennsylvania, where she developed multiple preclinical chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy platforms. During her postdoctoral work with Crystal mackall at Stanford university, she developed models to interrogate and strategies to mitigate CAR T cell exhaustion. At Lyell Immunopharma, her research group will continue to investigate optimal strategies for adoptive T cell therapy in cancer.
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) can have viral or non-viral causes1–5. Non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) is an important driver of HCC. Immunotherapy has been approved for treating HCC, but biomarker-based stratification of patients for optimal response to therapy is an unmet need6,7. Here we report the progressive accumulation of exhausted, unconventionally activated CD8+PD1+ T cells in NASH-affected livers. In preclinical models of NASH-induced HCC, therapeutic immunotherapy targeted at programmed death-1 (PD1) expanded activated CD8+PD1+ T cells within tumours but did not lead to tumour regression, which indicates that tumour immune surveillance was impaired. When given prophylactically, anti-PD1 treatment led to an increase in the incidence of NASH–HCC and in the number and size of tumour nodules, which correlated with increased hepatic CD8+PD1+CXCR6+, TOX+, and TNF+ T cells. The increase in HCC triggered by anti-PD1 treatment was prevented by depletion of CD8+ T cells or TNF neutralization, suggesting that CD8+ T cells help to induce NASH–HCC, rather than invigorating or executing immune surveillance. We found similar phenotypic and functional profiles in hepatic CD8+PD1+ T cells from humans with NAFLD or NASH. A meta-analysis of three randomized phase III clinical trials that tested inhibitors of PDL1 (programmed death-ligand 1) or PD1 in more than 1,600 patients with advanced HCC revealed that immune therapy did not improve survival in patients with non-viral HCC. In two additional cohorts, patients with NASH-driven HCC who received anti-PD1 or anti-PDL1 treatment showed reduced overall survival compared to patients with other aetiologies. Collectively, these data show that non-viral HCC, and particularly NASH–HCC, might be less responsive to immunotherapy, probably owing to NASH-related aberrant T cell activation causing tissue damage that leads to impaired immune surveillance. Our data provide a rationale for stratification of patients with HCC according to underlying aetiology in studies of immunotherapy as a primary or adjuvant treatment.
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