The clinical application of cytokine therapies for cancer treatment remains limited due to severe adverse reactions and insufficient therapeutic effects. Although cytokine localization by intratumoral administration could address both issues, the rapid escape of soluble cytokines from the tumor invariably subverts this effort. We find that intratumoral administration of a cytokine fused to the collagen-binding protein lumican prolongs local retention and markedly reduces systemic exposure. Combining local administration of lumican-cytokine fusions with systemic immunotherapies (tumor-targeting antibody, checkpoint blockade, cancer vaccine, or T cell therapy) improves efficacy without exacerbating toxicity in syngeneic tumor models and the BrafV600E/Ptenfl/fl genetically engineered melanoma model. Curative abscopal effects on noncytokine-injected tumors were also observed as a result of a protective and systemic CD8+ T cell response primed by local therapy. Cytokine collagen-anchoring constitutes a facile, tumor-agnostic strategy to safely potentiate otherwise marginally effective systemic immunotherapies.

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NATure BIoMedIcAl eNgINeerINgdeveloped an approach for in-cell site-specific protein phosphorylation to synthesize bioactive proteins fused with a phosphorylated alum-binding peptide (ABP) tag. We used this approach to produce a series of ABP-labelled cytokines, which rapidly adsorbed to alum after simple mixing, and upon i.t. injection were retained in tumours for more than a week. Applied to the cytokine IL-12, this approach dramatically increased i.t. retention of the cytokine and eliminated systemic toxicities seen upon i.t. injection of the free drug, while also increasing anti-tumour efficacy. Moreover, a single i.t. dose of alum-anchored IL-12 elicited strong IFN-γ-dependent collaboration between innate and adaptive immune cells, producing robust systemic anti-tumour responses in multiple poorly immunogenic preclinical models when combined with systemic checkpoint blockade therapy. ResultsTargeted phosphorylation via an in-cell approach is robust. A single kinase, Fam20C, is responsible for phosphorylation of

Direct injection of therapies into tumors has emerged as an administration route capable of achieving high local drug exposure and strong anti-tumor response. A diverse array of immune agonists ranging in size and target are under development as local immunotherapies. However, due to the relatively recent adoption of intratumoral administration, the pharmacokinetics of locally-injected biologics remains poorly defined, limiting rational design of tumor-localized immunotherapies. Here we define a pharmacokinetic framework for biologics injected intratumorally that can predict tumor exposure and effectiveness. We find empirically and computationally that extending the tumor exposure of locally-injected interleukin-2 by increasing molecular size and/or improving matrix-targeting affinity improves therapeutic efficacy in mice. By tracking the distribution of intratumorally-injected proteins using positron emission tomography, we observe size-dependent enhancement in tumor exposure occurs by slowing the rate of diffusive escape from the tumor and by increasing partitioning to an apparent viscous region of the tumor. In elucidating how molecular weight and matrix binding interplay to determine tumor exposure, our model can aid in the design of intratumoral therapies to exert maximal therapeutic effect.

Peptide ligands are used to increase the specificity of drug carriers to their target cells and to facilitate intracellular delivery. One method to identify such peptide ligands, phage display, enables high-throughput screening of peptide libraries for ligands binding to therapeutic targets of interest. However, conventional methods for identifying target binders in a library by Sanger sequencing are low-throughput, labor-intensive, and provide a limited perspective (< 0.01%) of the complete sequence space. Moreover, the small sample space can be dominated by non-specific, preferentially amplifying “parasitic sequences” and plastic-binding sequences, which may lead to the identification of false positives or exclude the identification of target-binding sequences. To overcome these challenges, we employed next-generation Illumina sequencing to couple high-throughput screening and high-throughput sequencing, enabling more comprehensive access to the phage display library sequence space. In this work, we define the hallmarks of binding sequences in next-generation sequencing data, and develop a method that identifies several target-binding phage clones for murine, alternatively-activated (M2) macrophages with a high (100%) success rate: sequences and binding motifs were reproducibly present across biological replicates; binding motifs were identified across multiple unique sequences; and an unselected, amplified library accurately filtered out parasitic sequences. In addition, we validate the Multiple Em for Motif Elicitation tool as an efficient and principled means of discovering binding sequences.