RETRACTED ARTICLE: Cross-HLA targeting of intracellular oncoproteins with peptide-centric CARs

Abstract The majority of oncogenic drivers are intracellular proteins, thus constraining their immunotherapeutic targeting to mutated peptides (neoantigens) presented by individual human leukocyte antigen (HLA) allotypes 1 . However, most cancers have a modest mutational burden that is insufficient to generate responses using neoantigen-based therapies 2,3 . Neuroblastoma is a paediatric cancer that harbours few mutations and is instead driven by epigenetically deregulated transcriptional networks 4 . Here we show that the neuroblastoma immunopeptidome is enriched with peptides derived from proteins that are essential for tumourigenesis and focus on targeting the unmutated peptide QYNPIRTTF, discovered on HLA-A*24:02, which is derived from the neuroblastoma dependency gene and master transcriptional regulator PHOX2B . To target QYNPIRTTF, we developed peptide-centric chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) using a counter-panning strategy with predicted potentially cross-reactive peptides. We further hypothesized that peptide-centric CARs could recognize peptides on additional HLA allotypes when presented in a similar manner. Informed by computational modelling, we showed that PHOX2B peptide-centric CARs also recognize QYNPIRTTF presented by HLA-A*23:01 and the highly divergent HLA-B*14:02. Finally, we demonstrated potent and specific killing of neuroblastoma cells expressing these HLAs in vitro and complete tumour regression in mice. These data suggest that peptide-centric CARs have the potential to vastly expand the pool of immunotherapeutic targets to include non-immunogenic intracellular oncoproteins and widen the population of patients who would benefit from such therapy by breaking conventional HLA restriction.