Fig. 7: In vivo administration of pilin 938 increases the proliferative and functional ability of tumor-infiltrated CD8⁺ T cell in combined with anti-PD-1 (aPD-1) treatment.

a Schematic timeline of the mouse experiment relative to the tumor injection date. b, c MC38 tumor growth of mice injected with or without pilin 938 along with aPD-1 treatment (b) and its corresponding survival curves (c). The significance between each group was calculated using the Mantel-Cox test. Each treatment group had seven mice (n = 7) allocated per group. d Frequency of Ki67⁺ PD-1⁺ CD8⁺ T cells from peripheral blood mononuclear cell (PBMC). (aPD1+Pilin 938 = 9, aPD1+PBS = 10, Isotype+Pilin938 = 9, Isotype+PBS = 10) e, f Flow cytometry plot (e) and bar graph (f) showing the cytokine expression frequency of tumor infiltrated CD8⁺ T cells stimulated ex vivo with PMA. Each treatment group had five mice (n = 5) per group. b–e Data points and error bars represent mean ± SEM. g UMAP plot showing subclusters of T cells integrated from all treatment types. h Proportions of T cell subclusters in T cells for each treatment group. i Ratios of proliferating CD8⁺ T cells to Treg. j UMAP plots of T cells colored with TCR clonal expansion status. k Cell count of clonal types from proliferating CD8⁺ T cell subsets. l Shannon index for indicating TCR diversity for T cells. For (b), the significance was calculated using Two-Way ANOVA with Tukey’s multiple comparisons test (all significant comparisons are shown), and for (c), the indicated significance was calculated using pairwise two-tailed log-rank test (all significant comparisons are shown). The significance shown in (d) and (f) were calculated using One-Way ANOVA Tukey’s multiple comparisons test. Except for FACS and sequencing data of tumor infiltrated CD8⁺ T cells (e–l), which were conducted once, all other data (a–d) are representative of two independent experiments. Source data are provided as a Source Data file. (*P < 0.05, **P < 0.01, ***P < 0.001, ****P < 0.0001).