The promise of adaptive cancer immunotherapy in treating highly malignant tumors such as glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) can only be realized through expanding its benefits to more patients. Alleviating various modes of immune suppression has so far failed to achieve such expansion, but exploiting endogenous immune enhancers among mutated cancer genes could represent a more direct approach to immunotherapy improvement. We found that Isocitrate Dehydrogenase-1 (IDH1), which is commonly mutated in gliomas, enhances glioma vaccine efficacy in mice and discerns long from short survivors after vaccine therapy in GBM patients. Extracellular IDH1 directly enhanced T cell responses to multiple tumor antigens, and prolonged experimental glioma cell lysis. Moreover, IDH1 specifically bound to and exhibited sialidase activity against CD8. By contrast, mutant IDH1R132H lacked sialidase activity, delayed killing in glioma cells, and decreased host survival after immunotherapy. Overall, our findings identify IDH1 as an immunotherapeutic enhancer that mediates the known T cell-enhancing reaction of CD8 desialylation. This uncovers a new axis for immunotherapeutic improvement in GBM and other cancers, reveals novel physiological and molecular functions of IDH1, and hints at an unexpectedly direct link between lytic T cell function and metabolic activity in target cells.

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