The aims of the laboratory are: 1) basic study of cancer immunology and 2) 55translational research (TR) in immunotherapy. Immunotherapy can stim-ulate the activities of specific components of the immune system or counteract signals derived from cancer cells that suppress immune responses. Although the successes of current immunotherapies represent a clinical turning point, their efficacy is still limited. We have several ongoing projects based on innate immunity-driven cancer immunology. First, we invented a new type of immu-notherapy, called the artificial adjuvant vector cell (aAVC), which is a unique drug delivery platform composed of an NKT cell ligand/CD1d complex and a tumor-associated antigen. In the current year, we continue the Phase II clini-cal study of an aAVC expressing the Wilms’ tumor 1 antigen (WT1) (aAVC-WT1) against acute myelogenous leukemia, in collaboration with the Institute of Medical Science, the University of Tokyo (IMSUT), Chiba University, and Kagawa University. In addition, we have developed a SARS-CoV-2 spike pro-tein-expressing aAVC (aAVC-CoV-2) as a COVID-19 vaccine and verified that aAVC-CoV-2 induced robust multifunctional SARS-CoV-2-specific T cells as well as the production of anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. Second, we are engaged in a multi-omics analysis of the tumor microenvironment. During this year, we established a method of identifying neoantigens from human multiple my-eloma cell lines using human blood and verified that they can induce antigen-specific T cell responses. Third, we identified the transcriptional corepressor “zeb2” as an intrinsic factor of memory invariant NKT (iNKT) cells with strong antitumor effects and have been characterizing these cells in terms of intrinsic and extrinsic factors. In addition to our projects, we have some collaborative projects: 1) the functional evaluation of the human immune system as the sup-port institute for the vaccine development (SCARDA) project and 2) the immu-nological analysis of the COVID-19 vaccine in cancer patients.Figure: Zeb2 regulates differentiation of long-lived effector invariant natural killer T cellsAfter ligand stimulation, Zeb2 plays essential roles in the differentiation and maintenance of the Klrg1+ Cx3cr1+GzmA+ iNKT cell population derived from the NKT1 subset by preventing apoptosis.Recent Major PublicationsIyoda T*, Shimizu K*, Endo T, Watanabe T, Taniuchi I, Aoshima H, Satoh M, Nakazato H, Yamasaki S, Fujii S. Zeb2 regulates differentiation of long-lived effector of invariant NKT cells. Commun Biol 6, 1070 (2023) *equally contributionShimizu K, Ueda S, Kawamura M, Aoshima H, Satoh M, Nakabayashi J, Fujii S. Combination of cancer vaccine with CD122-biased IL-2/anti-IL-2 Ab complex shapes the stem-like effector NK and CD8+ T cells against tumor. J Immunother Cancer 11, e006409 (2023)Okada M, Shimizu K, Nakazato H, Yamasaki S, Fujii S. Detection of mutant antigen-specific T cell receptors against multiple myeloma for T cell engineering. Mol Ther Methods Clin Dev 29, 541-555 (2023)Invited presentationsFujii S. “Artificial adjuvant vector cells with multifunc-tionality for cancer and infectious disease.” Faculty De-velopment in Hiroshima University, School of Medicine (Hiroshima, Japan) December 2023Fujii S. “Therapeutic cellular vaccine eliciting multifunc-tional immunity against cancer” The 82nd Annual Meet-ing of the Japanese Cancer Association (Tokyo, Japan) September 2023Fujii S. “Development of monitoring system of antigen-specific T cells against infectious disease~Influenza viral model~” The 1st Joint Symposium of Kyoto University and RIKEN-IMS as Support Institutions (Kyoto, Japan) August 2023Fujii S. “Therapeutic vaccine eliciting multifunctional immunity, artificial adjuvant vector cells (aAVC)” RIKEN IMS-JSI International Symposium on Immunology 2023 (Tokyo, Japan) June 2023Fujii S. “Novel Immunotherapeutic vaccine, artificial adjuvant vector cells eliciting both innate and adaptive immunity.” The 20th Annual Meeting of Japan Research Association for Immunotherapeutics (Tokyo, Japan) June 2023Laboratory for ImmunotherapyTeam Leader: Shin-ichiro Fujii
元のページ ../index.html#61