Study of dose-dependent combination immunotherapy using engineered T cells and IL-2 in cervical cancer

Abstract: Adoptive T cell based immunotherapy is gaining significant traction in cancer treatment. Despite its limited success, so far, in treating solid cancers, it is increasingly successful, demonstrating to have a broader therapeutic potential. In this paper we develop a mathematical model to study the efficacy of engineered T cell receptor (TCR) T cell therapy targeting the E7 antigen in cervical cancer cell lines. We consider a dynamical system that follows the population of cancer cells, TCR T cells, and IL-2. We demonstrate that there exists a TCR T cell dosage window for a successful cancer elimination that can be expressed in terms of the initial tumor size. We obtain the TCR T cell dose for two cervical cancer cell lines: 4050 and CaSki. Finally, a combination therapy of TCR T cell and IL-2 treatment is studied. We show that certain treatment protocols can improve therapy responses in the 4050 cell line, but not in the CaSki cell line.