Peritoneal NK cells are responsive to IL-15 and percentages are correlated with outcome in advanced ovarian cancer patients.

Peritoneal NK cells are responsive to IL-15 and percentages are correlated with outcome in advanced ovarian cancer patients. Oncotarget. 2018 Oct 05;9(78):34810-34820 Authors: Hoogstad-van Evert JS, Maas RJ, van der Meer J, Cany J, van der Steen S, Jansen JH, Miller JS, Bekkers R, Hobo W, Massuger L, Dolstra H Abstract The demonstration that ovarian carcinoma (OC) is an immunogenic disease, opens opportunities to explore immunotherapeutic interventions to improve clinical outcome. In this regard, NK cell based immunotherapy could be promising as it has been demonstrated that OC cells are susceptible to killing by cytokine-stimulated NK cells. Here, we evaluated whether percentage, phenotype, function and IL-15 responsiveness of ascites-derived natural killer (NK) cells is related to progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) of advanced stage OC patients. Generally, a lower percentage of NK cells within the lymphocyte fraction was seen in OC ascites (mean 17.4 ± 2.7%) versus benign peritoneal fluids (48.1 ± 6.8%; p < 0.0001). Importantly, a higher CD56+ NK cell percentage in ascites was associated with a better PFS (p = 0.01) and OS (p = 0.002) in OC patients. Furthermore, the functionality of ascites-derived NK cells in terms of CD107a/IFN-γ activity was comparable to that of healthy donor peripheral blood NK cells, and stimulation with monomeric IL-15 or IL-15 superagonist ALT-803 potently improved their reacti...
Source: Oncotarget - Category: Cancer & Oncology Tags: Oncotarget Source Type: research