New strategies for augmenting the actual performance of therapeutic T cells in vivo are needed for improving clinical outcome of adoptive cell therapy. Cumulative findings suggest that CD40 plays an intrinsic role in T cell costimulation. Recently, we demonstrated the ability of truncated, auto-oligomerizing CD40 derivatives to induce strong activation of APCs in a ligand-independent manner. We reasoned that constitutively active CD40 (caCD40) can similarly exert enhancing effects on human antitumor T cells. To test this assumption, we transfected human T cells with in vitro-transcribed caCD40 mRNA. In polyclonal T cells, caCD40 triggered IFN-γ secretion and upregulated CD25 and 4-1BB. In antimelanoma tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), caCD40 induced massive production of IFN-γ, exerting a pronounced synergistic effect when coexpressed with constitutively active TLR4 devoid of its extracellular ligand binding. In unselected "young" TILs, caCD40 reproducibly increased surface expression of CD25, OX40, 4-1BB, CD127, and CD28. Three days post-mRNA electroporation of CD8 TILs, caCD40 elevated IFN-γ and TNF-α production and cytolytic activity in the presence of autologous but not HLA-I-mismatched melanoma. Enhanced killing of autologous melanoma by young TILs was observed 4 d posttransfection. These findings suggest that caCD40 can function as a potent T cell adjuvant and provide essential guidelines for similar manipulation of other key members of the TNFR family.
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