Abstract

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is recognized as a major causative agent of parenterally transmittable non-A, non-B hepatitis. 1 HCV infection often persists for a long time and leads to chronic liver diseases; at least half of the HCV cases develop into chronic hepatitis, and 10% to 20% of cases develop into cirrhosis. 2 The high HCV mutation rate readily generates variants that contribute to establishing the persistent infection. 3

We have previously reported that human liver cancer cell lines produce interleukin-8 (IL-8) at high levels. Those tumor cells appeared to express two kinds of IL-8 receptor on their surface. In order to analyze the role of IL-8 on the biological characteristics of those tumor cells, we suppressed IL-8 production from human liver (HuH-7 and HuCC-T1) and pancreatic cancer cell lines (HuP-T4) by treatment with IL-8 antisense oligonucleotides. Suppression of IL-8 production resulted not only in inhibition of cell growth, but also in an increase in the concentrations of some tumor-associated substances such as carbohydrate antigen 19-9 (CA19-9) in the medium. These data indicate that IL-8 produced by human liver and pancreatic tumors may act as an autocrine growth factor and may control the production of some tumor-associated substances. Furthermore, surface expression of sialyl-Lewis(a), which is a ligand for ELAM-1 on human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC), HuCC-T1 and HuP-T4 cells was decreased and the attachment of these tumor cells to HUVEC was inhibited by treatment with IL-8 antisense oligonucleotide. Since the soluble form of CA19-9 (sialyl-Lewis(a)) was shown to inhibit the tumor cell binding to HUVEC, the decrease in release of CA19-9 into the medium and increase in the expression of sialyl-Lewis(a) on the cell surface may suggest that IL-8 production from the tumor cells enhances metastatic potential by augmenting the binding activity of the tumor cells to HUVEC. These data demonstrate that a cytokine produced by tumor cells may function as an autocrine growth factor and affect tumor cell dissemination.

A variety of strategies have been attempted in the past to stably transduce natural killer (NK) cells with cytokine or other cellular genes. Here, we demonstrate the successful delivery of the interleukin-2 (IL-2) gene into two human NK cell lines, IL-2–dependent NK-92 and IL-2–independent YT, by retroviral transduction. An MuLV-based retroviral vector expressing human IL-2 andneor markers from a polycistronic message was constructed and transduced into a CRIP packaging cell line. By coincubation of NK cells with monolayers of CRIP cells or by using retrovirus-containing supernatants in a flow-through method, 10% to 20% of NK cells were stably transduced. Upon selection in the presence of increasing G418 concentrations, transduced NK cells were able to proliferate independently of IL-2 for more than 5 months and to secrete up to 5.5 ng/106 cells/24 h of IL-2. IL-2 gene-transduced NK-92 cells had an in vitro cytotoxicity against tumor targets that was significantly higher than that of parental cells and secreted interferon gamma (IFNγ) and tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNFα) in addition to IL-2. Moreover, the in vivo antitumor activity of IL-2 gene-transduced NK-92 cells against established 3-day liver metastases in mice was greater than that of parental nontransduced NK cells. Stable expression of the IL-2 transgene in NK cells improved their therapeutic potential in tumor-bearing hosts. Thus, transduced NK cells secreted sufficient quantities of bioactive IL-2 to proliferate in vitro and mediated the antitumor effects both in vitro and in vivo in the absence of exogenous IL-2. These results suggest that genetic modification of NK cells ex vivo could be useful for clinical cancer therapy in the future.

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