Investigator Award Renewed
for M.D. Anderson Instructor

The recipient of a New Investigator Award from ASBMT and Astellas Pharma US, Inc., (formerly Fujisawa Healthcare) has submitted a mid-project progress report on his research concerning ways to elicite donor cytotoxic T-lymphocytes (CTLs) specifically targeted against a previously identified leukemia-associated antigen, termed PR1.

Sijie Lu, PhD, is an instructor at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas, Houston, and a member of the cancer center’s Department of Blood and Marrow Transplantation, Section of Transplant Immunology.

His group at M.D. Anderson proposed to develop microbeads coated with synthetic PR1-HLA protein complexes to select and purify peptide-specific cytotoxic T-lymphocytes (CTLs) from donor lymphocytes.  Initial results showed no significant difference in the number of PR1-specific CTLs between donors positive vs. negative for HLA-A2.  Because of the low frequency of  PR1-CTLs in healthy donors, the researchers shifted their focus to eliciting PR1-CTLs, then isolating them from expanded cultures.

Toward that end, Dr. Lu and colleagues have developed a technique of purifying in vitro folded PR1/HLA-A2 complex and are working on methods of purifying human 4-1BB ligand from host cell lines.   By coupling HLA-A2/PR1 complex, CD80-Fc, and soluble 4-1BBL to microbeads, they have succeeded in creating an initial version of PR1-specific artificial antigen-presenting cells.  The next step will be to test the ability of these artificial cells to elicit PR1-CTLs from HLA-A2-positive donors, compared with autologous dendritic cells.

Based on his progress to date, the $25,000-per-year award for Dr. Lu’s research has been renewed for a second year.