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Home Cancer Marker PD-L1 Leads to Potential Tool for Studying Metabolic Disorders

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Cancer Marker PD-L1 Leads to Potential Tool for Studying Metabolic Disorders

January 2018

Recently as reported in Nature Nanotechnology, researchers used the TriLink Chromalink® Technology (Figure 1) to help determine Programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) expression in a healthy mice.

The Chromalink Technology provides everything you need for convenient, quantifiable, antibody or protein biotinylation
Figure 1: The Chromalink Technology provides everything you need for convenient, quantifiable, antibody or protein biotinylation.

PD-L1 is an important immune regulatory molecule linked to multiple types of cancer and has gained attention from drug companies in recent years.

Currently, there are several commercial immunotherapies targeting the PD-L1 pathway and recent clinical trial results have fueled a massive increase in immunotherapy-related cancer research.

"Despite the impressive gains in immunotherapy for cancer, heterogeneous outcomes necessitate new methods to monitor and predict patient responses. A method that comprehensively monitors PD-L1 expression could be of diagnostic value, and may help resolve lingering questions about the role of PD-L1 expression in checkpoint blockade responses," the authors explain.

With the help of ChromaLink NHS-biotin reagent, the authors developed a phage display to detect and isolate two high-affinity antibodies to PD-L1.

After identifying the candidate antibodies, the authors used immuno-positron emission tomography-computed tomography (PET-CT) to track PD-L1 expression.

Interestingly, they found that in healthy mice, PD-L1 was predominantly expressed by brown adipocyte tissue (BAT)(Figure 2). This is in contrast to previous speculation that PD-L1 was actually expressed by hematopoietic cells that had infiltrated adipose tissue.

PD-L1 immuno-PET reveals expression in brown adipose tissue
Figure 2: PD-L1 immuno-PET reveals expression in brown adipose tissue. (Courtesy of Ingram et al. 2017 Nat Commun. 2017; 8: 647) .

Importantly, they note that PD-L1 levels are activation independent. Previous BAT markers only measured activated brown adipose tissue, which has practical limitations. Having an activity independent marker will open new avenues for studying metabolic disorders.

"Our studies thus provide a new tool to screen for therapeutic interventions of BAT function in metabolic disorders. Imaging of BAT will be essential if we are to harness its biology for the treatment of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and other metabolic disorders," the authors conclude.

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