Following acute infection, the adaptive immune system (i.e., humoral and cellular immunity) controls the bulk of acute HBV-related hepatitis. Still, a number of people in the HBV-endemic regions cannot eliminate the viruses and subsequently convert as chronic individuals. More than 25% of chronic patients (>250 million people) worldwide develop progressive liver disease, resulting in liver cirrhosis and/or hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC)1. As a result, eradication of insistently infected cells remains a general healthiness problem, even though there is an available vaccine2 and numerous antiviral medicines are under development. Standard treatment for HBV infection includes IFN-α, nucleoside, and nucleotide analogues. These agents have direct antiviral activity and immune modulatory capacities. Nevertheless, seroconversion of HBe antigen (Ag)+ carriers with anti-HBe antibody (Ab) and loss of serum HBV deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) appear individually in approximately 20% of treated patients, and whole immunological control of the virus verified by the deprivation of the HBsAg is no more than 5%3. Moreover, the response to treatment is often not durable. Prophylactic vaccination with recombinant HBs Ag is highly effective in preventing infection, but therapeutic HBs Ag vaccination is not effective. Clearly, T cell-mediated immune responses play a critical role in controlling HBV infection and liver impairment; however, in chronic hepatitis patients, HBV-reactive T cells are often deleted, dysfunctional, or convert exhausted4,5,6. Consequently, in individuals with persistent HBV infection, no attempts to reinstate HBV-specific immunity (i.e., T cell-based immunity) by means of anti-viral remedy, immuno-modulatory cytokines, or curative immunization have achieved success.
Adoptive cell transfer (ACT) of HBV Ag-specific T cells is an efficient treatment directed to eventually eradicate remaining hepatocytes wih HBV7,8. ACT of HBV-specific CTLs into HBV-infected mice has been shown to cause transient, mild hepatitis, and a dramatic drop in HBV ribonucleic acid (RNA) transcripts in hepatocytes. In these studies, CTLs did not inhibit transcription of HBV genes but enhanced the degradation of HBV transcripts9. HBV-specific CTLs are important to prevent viral infection and mediate the clearance of HBV10,11. For ACT-based remedies, in vitro expansion of HBV-specific T cells with a high reactivity for in vivo resettlement has been suggested to be an ideal method12,13,14; nevertheless, the present approaches are restricted regarding their abilities to generate, separate, and grow appropriate quantities and qualities of HBV-specific T cells from patients for the potential therapies.
Although clinical trials present safety, practicability, and prospective therapeutic activity of cell-based treatments by means of engineered T cells that are specific to HBV virus-infected hepatocytes, there are worries about the unfavorable effects occurring from autoimmune responses because of cross-reactivity from mispairing T cell receptor (TCR)15,16, off-target Ag recognition by non-specific TCR17 and on-target off-toxicity by a chimeric Ag receptor (CAR)18,19 with healthy tissues. Currently, the genetically modified T cells, which only have short-term persistence in vivo, are usually intermediate or later effector T cells. To date, pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) are the only source available to generate high numbers of naive single-type Ag-specific T cells20,21,22,23. Induced PSCs (iPSCs) are simply converted from a patient’s somatic cells through the use of gene transduction of several transcription factors. As a result, the iPSCs have similar characteristics as those of embryonic stem cells (ESCs)24. Owing to the flexibility and possibility for the infinite ability to self-renew, in addition to tissue replacement, iPSC-based treatments may be widely applied in regenerative medicine. Furthermore, the regiments underlying iPSCs may substantially improve current cell-based therapies.
The overall goal of this method is to generate a large amount of HBV-specific CTLs from iPSCs (i.e., iPSC-CTLs) for ACT-based immunotherapy. The advantages over alternative techniques are that HBV-specific iPSC-CTLs have a single-type TCR and naive phenotype, which results in more memory T cell development after the ACT. It is demonstrated that the ACT of HBV-specific iPSC-CTLs increases the migration of functional CD8+ T cells in the liver and reduces HBV replication in both the livers and blood of administered mice. This method reveals a potential use of viral Ag-specific iPSC-CTLs for HBV immunotherapy and may be adapted to generate other viral Ag-specific iPSC-T cells for viral immunotherapy.