Most of the

NK T cells of both patients were CD8+, with minor numbers presenting as double-negative and hardly any as CD4+. This is in contrast to the NK T subsets found usually in the peripheral blood of healthy donors or cancer patients, in which CD4+ NK T cells outnumber double-negative NK T cells and few or virtually no CD8+ NK T cells are found [8,27,28]. Our RCC patient data are in line with the correlation noted in healthy individuals between high peripheral NK T cell frequency and increase in CD4-negative NK T cells [9,28], which has been described to reverse with age [29]. The aberrant CD4-negative (and CD8-positive) NK T phenotype in patients B2 and B7 suggests that progressive differentiation and selected expansion may have occurred [30]. Expression of CD69 and CD161 would suggest that these NK T cells are recently find more activated RAD001 in vitro and mature [1]. In humans, the number of peripheral CD4+ NK T cells is supported mainly by thymic output and survival and controlled by IL-7 [31], whereas CD4- NK T cells in the periphery are thought to be driven by IL-15-dependent homeostatic proliferation [30,32] Therefore, in the absence of a known antigenic trigger, the high NK T frequency in our patients can most probably be explained by homeostatic expansion, for which the normal levels of IL-15 that are detectable, may be sufficient. Homeostasis would also explain the relatively

stable NK T frequency observed in the patients. The strong drop in CD69 expression, but not in NK T cell numbers, after stopping IFN-α treatment click here (see Table 4), may indicate that IFN-α can influence activation, but has no direct effect on homeostasis. NK T cells have been described to activate downstream immune effector pathways, and this has prompted combination treatments aimed at activating T cell-mediated anti-tumour responses [3,33,34].

Three factors will determine the outcome of interactions between NK T cells and antigen-presenting cells: (i) frequency, strength and duration of antigenic stimulus; (ii) differentiation state of antigen-presenting cells; and (iii) presence or absence of cytokines that co-stimulate NK T cells, among which is IFN-α[35]. IFN-α treatment of ourpatients does not appear to be a trigger for high NK T frequency, as low to normal NK T cell counts were present in 12 of 14 RCC patients. Furthermore, in patient B7 the high NK T frequency could be shown to be already present before therapy. However, IFN-α was found to enhance the activation state in a co-stimulatory manner. As shown in Table 4, it increased CD69 expression of NK T cells, sometimes with a short delay. Particularly in patients B2 and B7, changes in activation of conventional T and non-T cells, parallel to NK T cells, were observed, indicating that IFN-α treatment also affected these cell types.