A Study of pH Manipulation on Tumor Proliferation and the CTL Response

Adoptive Cell Transfer (ACT) Therapy is a cancer treatment that enhances and utilizes the body’s own immune system. However, this treatment has had limited success in clinical trials. We hypothesized that this is due to the immunosuppressive, acidic microenvironment of cancer tumors. We tested the effects of acidic, neutral, and basic environments in vitro on cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) survival, activation, migration and killing ability and on cancer cell survival. We found that CTLs have most optimum survival, activation, and migration in a neutral environment, while the optimal extracellular conditions for EG-7 lymphoma are slightly acidic and B16-OVA melanoma survives best in physiological conditions. Future research should further study the killing ability of T cells in the three different environments and look to move to in vivo experiments.