Generation of Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells from Human Melanoma Tumor-infiltrating Lymphocytes

Adoptive transfer of ex vivo expanded autologous tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) can mediate durable and complete responses in significant subsets of patients with metastatic melanoma. Major obstacles of this approach are the reduced viability of transferred T cells, caused by telomere shortening, and the limited number of TILs obtained from patients. Less-differentiated T cells with long telomeres would be an ideal T cell subset for adoptive T cell therapy;however, generating large numbers of these less-differentiated T cells is problematic. This limitation of adoptive T cell therapy can be theoretically overcome by using induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) that self-renew, maintain pluripotency, have elongated telomeres, and provide an unlimited source of autologous T cells for immunotherapy. Here, we present a protocol to generate iPSCs using Sendai virus vectors for the transduction of reprogramming factors into TILs. This protocol generates fully reprogrammed, vector-free clones. These TIL-derived iPSCs might be able to generate less-differentiated patient- and tumor-specific T cells for adoptive T cell therapy.