Exhaustion-associated regulatory regions in CD8 ⁺ tumor-infiltrating T cells

Abstract

Significance Cancer cells can be recognized and attacked by CD8 + cytolytic T cells, but tumor-infiltrating T cells often become functionally incompetent (“exhausted”) and fail to destroy tumor cells. We show that T-cell exhaustion requires antigen recognition by tumor-infiltrating T cells. By examining the transcriptional and chromatin accessibility profiles of antigen-reactive and -unreactive tumor-infiltrating cells, we confirm our previous conclusion that the transcription factor NFAT promotes CD8 + T-cell exhaustion and we identify Nr4a transcription factors as new targets for future investigation. We show that anti–PD-L1 treatment, a clinically relevant checkpoint blockade therapy that counteracts T-cell exhaustion, has modest but functionally important effects on gene expression in exhausted cells, without causing major changes in patterns of chromatin accessibility.