Abstract

Immune cells play a critical role in surveilling and defending against cancer, emphasizing the importance of understanding how they interact and communicate with cancer cells to determine cancer status, treatment response, and the formation of the tumor microenvironment (TME). To this end, we conducted a study demonstrating the effectiveness of an enzyme-mediated intercellular proximity labeling (EXCELL) method, which utilizes a modified version of the sortase A enzyme known as mgSrtA, in detecting and characterizing immune-tumor cell interactions. The mgSrtA enzyme is expressed on the membrane of tumor cells, which is able to label immune cells that interact with tumor cells in a proximity-dependent manner. Our research indicates that the EXCELL technique can detect and characterize immune-tumor cell interactions in a time- and concentration-dependent manner, both in vitro and in vivo, without requiring pre-engineering of the immune cells. We also highlight its ability to detect various types of immune cell subpopulations in vivo that have migrated out of tumor into the spleen, providing insights into the role of peripheral T cell recruitment in tumor progression. Overall, our findings suggest that the EXCELL method has great potential for improving our understanding of immune cell dynamics within the TME, ultimately leading to more potent pharmacological effects and cancer immunotherapy strategies.

Significance Statement The EXCELL method holds promise for detecting immune cell interactions with cancer cells, both in vitro and in vivo. It has important implications for studying immune tumor cell dynamics and potentially uncover novel subtypes of immune cells within the TME, both prior to and during immunotherapeutic interventions.