Targeting cancer glycosylation repolarizes tumor-associated macrophages allowing effective immune checkpoint blockade

作者：Michal A. Stanczak, Natália Rodrigues Mantuano, Nicole Kirchhammer, David E. Sanin, Francis Jacob, Ricardo Coelho, Arun Everest‐Dass, Jinyu Wang, Marcel P. Trefny, Gianni Monaco, Anne Bärenwaldt, Melissa Anne Gray, Adam Petrone, Abhishek S. Kashyap, Katharina Glatz, Benjamin Kasenda, Karl Normington, James Broderick, Li Peng, Oliver M.T. Pearce, Erika L. Pearce, Carolyn Ruth Bertozzi, Alfred Zippelius, Heinz Philipp Laubli · 发表于：Science Translational Medicine · 年份：2022 · DOI：10.1126/scitranslmed.abj1270 · 被引用次数：249 · 研究领域：Immune cells in cancer、Glycosylation and Glycoproteins Research、Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics

Immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) has substantially improved the prognosis of patients with cancer, but the majority experiences limited benefit, supporting the need for new therapeutic approaches. Up-regulation of sialic acid-containing glycans, termed hypersialylation, is a common feature of cancer-associated glycosylation, driving disease progression and immune escape through the engagement of Siglec receptors on tumor-infiltrating immune cells. Here, we show that tumor sialylation correlates with distinct immune states and reduced survival in human cancers. The targeted removal of Siglec ligands in the tumor microenvironment, using an antibody-sialidase conjugate, enhanced antitumor immunity and halted tumor progression in several murine models. Using single-cell RNA sequencing, we revealed that desialylation repolarized tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs). We also identified Siglec-E as the main receptor for hypersialylation on TAMs. Last, we found that genetic and therapeutic desialylation, as well as loss of Siglec-E, enhanced the efficacy of ICB. Thus, therapeutic desialylation represents an immunotherapeutic approach to reshape macrophage phenotypes and augment the adaptive antitumor immune response.