Adoptive T cell therapy using patient T cells redirected to recognize tumor-specific antigens by expressing genetically engineered high-affinity T-cell receptors (TCRs) has therapeutic potential for melanoma and other solid tumors. Clinical trials implementing genetically modified TCRs in melanoma patients have raised concerns regarding off-target toxicities resulting in lethal destruction of healthy tissue, highlighting the urgency of assessing which off-target peptides can be recognized by a TCR. As a model system we used the clinically efficacious NY-ESO-1-specific TCR C²⁵⁹, which recognizes the peptide epitope SLLMWITQC presented by HLA-A^*02:01. We investigated which amino acids at each position enable a TCR interaction by sequentially replacing every amino acid position outside of anchor positions 2 and 9 with all 19 possible alternative amino acids, resulting in 134 peptides (133 altered peptides plus epitope peptide). Each peptide was individually evaluated using three different in vitro assays: binding of the NY-ESO^c259 TCR to the peptide, peptide-dependent activation of TCR-expressing cells, and killing of peptide-presenting target cells. To represent the TCR recognition kernel, we defined Position Weight Matrices (PWMs) for each assay by assigning normalized measurements to each of the 20 amino acids in each position. To predict potential off-target peptides, we applied a novel algorithm projecting the PWM-defined kernel into the human proteome, scoring NY-ESO^c259 TCR recognition of 336,921 predicted human HLA-A^*02:01 binding 9-mer peptides. Of the 12 peptides with high predicted score, we confirmed 7 (including NY-ESO-1 antigen SLLMWITQC) strongly activate human primary NY-ESO^c259-expressing T cells. These off-target peptides include peptides with up to 7 amino acid changes (of 9 possible), which could not be predicted using the recognition motif as determined by alanine scans. Thus, this replacement scan assay determines the "TCR fingerprint" and, when coupled with the algorithm applied to the database of human 9-mer peptides binding to HLA-A^*02:01, enables the identification of potential off-target antigens and the tissues where they are expressed. This platform enables both screening of multiple TCRs to identify the best candidate for clinical development and identification of TCR-specific cross-reactive peptide recognition and constitutes an improved methodology for the identification of potential off-target peptides presented on MHC class I molecules.

Armen R Karapetyan

Publications