The immune system influences the fate of developing cancers by not only functioning as a tumour promoter that facilitates cellular transformation, promotes tumour growth and sculpts tumour cell immunogenicity, but also as an extrinsic tumour suppressor that either destroys developing tumours or restrains their expansion. Yet, clinically apparent cancers still arise in immunocompetent individuals in part as a consequence of cancer-induced immunosuppression. In many individuals, immunosuppression is mediated by cytotoxic T-lymphocyte associated antigen-4 (CTLA-4) and programmed death-1 (PD-1), two immunomodulatory receptors expressed on T cells. Monoclonal-antibody-based therapies targeting CTLA-4 and/or PD-1 (checkpoint blockade) have yielded significant clinical benefits-including durable responses--to patients with different malignancies. However, little is known about the identity of the tumour antigens that function as the targets of T cells activated by checkpoint blockade immunotherapy and whether these antigens can be used to generate vaccines that are highly tumour-specific. Here we use genomics and bioinformatics approaches to identify tumour-specific mutant proteins as a major class of T-cell rejection antigens following anti-PD-1 and/or anti-CTLA-4 therapy of mice bearing progressively growing sarcomas, and we show that therapeutic synthetic long-peptide vaccines incorporating these mutant epitopes induce tumour rejection comparably to checkpoint blockade immunotherapy. Although mutant tumour-antigen-specific T cells are present in progressively growing tumours, they are reactivated following treatment with anti-PD-1 and/or anti-CTLA-4 and display some overlapping but mostly treatment-specific transcriptional profiles, rendering them capable of mediating tumour rejection. These results reveal that tumour-specific mutant antigens are not only important targets of checkpoint blockade therapy, but they can also be used to develop personalized cancer-specific vaccines and to probe the mechanistic underpinnings of different checkpoint blockade treatments.
Pubmed ID: 25428507 RIS Download
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The GEO Profiles database stores gene expression profiles derived from curated GEO DataSets. Each Profile is presented as a chart that displays the expression level of one gene across all Samples within a DataSet. Experimental context is provided in the bars along the bottom of the charts making it possible to see at a glance whether a gene is differentially expressed across different experimental conditions. Profiles have various types of links including internal links that connect genes that exhibit similar behaviour, and external links to relevant records in other NCBI databases. GEO Profiles can be searched using many different attributes including keywords, gene symbols, gene names, GenBank accession numbers, or Profiles flagged as being differentially expressed.
View all literature mentionsRepository contains antibody/B cell and T cell epitope information and epitope prediction and analysis tools. Immune epitopes are defined as molecular structures recognized by specific antigen receptors of the immune system, namely antibodies, B cell receptors, and T cell receptors. Immune epitopes from infectious diseases, excluding HIV, and immune-mediated diseases and the accompanying biological information are included.
View all literature mentionsCommercial antibody supplier and developer for biomedical research. These products are compatible with use in flow cytometry and mass cytometry, immunoprecipitation and chip, western blotting, immunofluorescence microscopy, and quantitative multiplexing.
View all literature mentionsSoftware for single-cell flow cytometry analysis. Its functions include management, display, manipulation, analysis and publication of the data stream produced by flow and mass cytometers.
View all literature mentionsSoftware that enables rapid tool creation by providing a robust, pluggable development framework that simplifies and unifies data file access, and performs standard proteomics and LCMS dataset computations.
View all literature mentionsSoftware tool as Windows client application for targeted proteomics method creation and quantitative data analysis. Open source document editor for creating and analyzing targeted proteomics experiments. Used for large scale quantitative mass spectrometry studies in life sciences.
View all literature mentionsSoftware package for differential gene expression analysis based on the negative binomial distribution. Used for analyzing RNA-seq data for differential analysis of count data, using shrinkage estimation for dispersions and fold changes to improve stability and interpretability of estimates.
View all literature mentionslaboratory mouse with name 129S6 from MGI.
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