Engineered Outer Membrane Vesicles as Nanosized Immune Cell Engagers for Enhanced Solid Tumor Immunotherapy

Abstract

Although tumor immunotherapy has achieved significant success in recent years, tackling solid tumors remains a formidable challenge. Here, we present an approach that utilizes outer membrane vesicles (OMVs) from bacterial cells as scaffolds to engage immune cells in solid tumor immunotherapy. Two types of nanobodies targeting CD47/SIRPα and PD-1/PD-L1 pathways were simultaneously conjugated onto the surfaces of the OMVs in divalent and trivalent forms using orthogonal SpyCatcher-SpyTag and SnoopCatcher-SnoopTag chemistry. This resulted in the generation of an OMV-based nanosized immune cell engager (OMV-NICE) with dual-targeting abilities. In vitro assays confirmed the retention of the function of the two nanobodies on the OMV-NICE, as evidenced by the synergistically enhanced macrophage phagocytosis and T cell cytotoxicity against tumor cells. In vivo studies using a B16-F10 melanoma mouse model also revealed the superior antitumor activity of OMV-NICE compared to those of unconjugated nanobodies and OMVs alone. Subsequent mechanistic investigations further supported the enhanced recruitment of macrophages and T cells to the tumor region by OMV-NICE. Overall, this work expands the current repertoire of immune cell engagers, and the developed OMV-NICE platform holds great promise for broad applications, particularly in solid tumor immunotherapy.

Keywords: SpyCatcher/SnoopCatcher; immune cell engager; nanobody; outer membrane vesicles; tumor immunotherapy.