In vitro culture with interleukin-15 leads to expression of activating receptors and recovery of natural killer cell function in acute myeloid leukemia patients

Abstract

Despite recent progress in the therapeutic approach of malignant hemopathies, their prognoses remain frequently poor. Immunotherapy could open a new window of great interest in this setting. Natural killer (NK) cells constitute an important area of research for hematologic malignancies, because this subpopulation is able to kill target cells spontaneously without previous sensitization, representing a novel tool in the treatment of them. Abnormal NK cytolytic function is observed in several hematological malignancies, including acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and myelodysplastic syndromes. Several mechanisms are involved in this abnormal function, such as decreased expression of activating receptors, increased expression of inhibitory receptors or defective expression of NK cell ligands on target cells. New immunotherapies are focused in identifying factors that could increase the expression of these activating receptors, to counteract inhibitory receptors expression, and therefore, to improve the NK cell cytotoxic capacities against tumor cells. In this work, we analyze the effect of interleukin (IL)-15 on the expression of NK cell-activating receptors that play a crucial role in the lysis of blasts from AML patients. Our results showed that IL-15 increased the surface expression of NKp30 on NK cells from healthy donors and AML patients with the consequent improvement of NK cell cytotoxicity. Besides, the upregulation of NKp30 induced by IL-15 is associated with an improvement of NK-mediated myeloid dendritic cells (DCs) maturation. NK cells cultured with IL-15 showed an upregulation of NKp30, which is associated with an increase anti-tumor activity and with an improved maturation of immature DCs. In our in vitro model, IL-15 exerted a great activating stimulus that could be used as novel immunotherapy in AML patients.