T Cell Activation By Okt3 Is A Function Of The Percent Monocytes In Pbmc Of Healthy Donors And Mds Patients

Background: Myelodysplastic Syndromes (MDS) are a heterogeneous hematologic malignancy characterized by bone marrow failure and cytopenias. The median survival rate for patients with higher-risk MDS who fail standard-of-care chemotherapy with hypomethylating agents (HMAs) is less than 6 months, and the only curative treatment for these patients is hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT). Over the past 10 years, immunotherapy as a cancer treatment has achieved variable levels of success in different tumor types. There are currently 22 active clinical trials of immunotherapies for MDS (www.clinicaltrials.gov; 7/30/19), including our phase I clinical trial with a personalized adoptive cellular therapy targeting MDS patient neoantigens (NCT 03258359). Because MDS patients are frequently monocytopenic and the existing literature is inconsistent regarding the ability of MDS patients' monocytes to support T cell activation, we compared the activation of MDS T cells with those of healthy donors in the presence of autologous monocytes.