Lifeng Wang, Bangxing Hong, Xiaoxia Jiang, Lindsey Jones, Si-Yi Chen, Xue F. Huang

Emerging evidence indicates that CD4(+) T cells possess cytotoxic potential for tumor eradication and perforin/granzyme-mediated cytotoxicity functions as one of the important mechanisms for CD4(+) T cell-triggered cell killing. However, the critical issue is how the cytotoxic CD4(+) T cells are developed. During the course of our work that aims at promoting immunostimulation of APCs by inhibition of negative regulators, we found that A20-silenced Mф drastically induced granzyme B expression in CD4(+) T cells. As a consequence, the granzyme-highly expressing CD4(+) T cells exhibited a strong cytotoxic activity that restricted tumor development. We found that A20-silenced Mф activated cytotoxic CD4(+) T cells by MHC class-II restricted mechanism and the activation was largely dependent on enhanced production of IFN-γ.