Endemic Burkitt lymphoma (eBL) is the leading pediatric cancer in sub-Saharan Africa and is associated with Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) and Plasmodium falciparum malaria co-infections. Current treatment options in Africa are combination chemotherapy with a survival rate hovering around 50%. Relapsed or refractory eBL patients have failed to receive any targeted treatments in the clinic. Our focus was to delineate immune responses in eBL, interrogate the tumor variation in responses to targeted treatments and develop mouse models that can be used to target essential mediators of tumor pathogenesis.
Immune-based treatments including immune checkpoint inhibition have recently become an effective therapeutic modality in oncology. However, some B cell lymphomas such as Hodgkin Lymphoma (HL), are more receptive to checkpoint inhibition than others suggesting a need to understand the efficacy of checkpoint inhibition on different lymphoma subtypes. Checkpoint inhibitors act by blocking inhibitory receptors on T cells and improving anti-tumor responses. One of the goals of this thesis was to characterize checkpoint inhibitors on Tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) in eBL tumors and to identify T cell subsets that exhibit increased expression of inhibitory receptors, poor cytokine production, poor proliferation and express transcription factors associated with exhaustion. Using scRNA seq, we identified T cell clusters that co-expressed inhibitory receptors, poor proliferative markers but also sustained costimulatory signals, as well as cytokine expression suggesting a pre dysfunctional state and not terminally exhausted state. Furthermore, we quantified the dominant co-inhibitory receptors PD1 and TIGIT that are upregulated in the tumor microenvironment via immunohistochemistry (IHC) and in peripheral blood of eBL patients via flow cytometry. We compared eBL patients with healthy pediatric cohorts with a history of persistent malaria exposure to those who had little to no malaria infections, to understand uniquely T cell mediated responses in BL children. Tumors had high co-expression of PD1 and TIGIT but fewer PD1 only populations, suggesting that both ligands may play a role in restraining immune activation via IHC. Next, we investigated if PD1 ligands or TIGIT ligands were overexpressed in eBL tumors. Nectin-2, TIGIT ligand was highly expressed in eBL tumors but was not highly correlated with TIGIT expression. These studies provide insights for PD1/ TIGIT blockade in Burkitt lymphoma patients.
Additionally, we established new patient-derived cell lines from eBL tumors to study tumor variation and to study targeted treatments. We established five new patient-derived eBL lines BL717, BL 719, BL720, BL725, and BL740 that were interrogated for their inter-patient variation by studying their gene expression profiles. Further, we developed a patient cell-line derived xenograft (CDX) mouse model by injecting newly patient-derived BL cell lines in immunodeficient mice (NSG BL) and studying BL tumorigenesis. Having successfully established NSG BL tumors, we observed differences in tumor growth sensitivity and survival. We tested rituximab efficacy, one of the most established treatments for B cell lymphomas in our mouse model. We also identified pathways associated with unfolded protein response (UPR) and the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) signaling, as well as apoptosis in one of the cell line xenografts, BL740, in response to rituximab. BL717, BL720 cell line xenograft failed to control tumor growth and was enriched in IFN-ɑ signature genes. This mouse model will prove to be useful to study combination therapy against eBL tumors as well as mechanisms of resistance to drug targets.
Collectively, these studies provide insights into intratumoral variation including subtypes during tumor progression and expression profiles of TILs in eBL tumors. This will be important in designing new therapeutic strategies as well as help pose novel therapeutic targets.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:umassmed.edu/oai:escholarship.umassmed.edu:gsbs_diss-2178 |
| Date | 29 November 2021 |
| Creators | Saikumar Lakshmi, Priya |
| Publisher | eScholarship@UMassChan |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts Medical School |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences Dissertations and Theses |
| Rights | Licensed under a Creative Commons license, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
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