Development of a novel personalized immunotherapy targeting common cancer antigens and neoantigens

概要

Hepatocellular carcinoma is a liver cancer with bad prognosis and frequent recurrences. Surgery and chemotherapy are not sufficient to induce a positive outcome. We developed here a novel personalized immunotherapy targeting common cancer antigens and neoantigens derived from somatic mutations in cancer which have attracted many attentions as cancer rejection antigens. Using Sendai Virus as vector to express endogenously glypican-3, a tumor associated antigen, and tumor infiltrating lymphocytes harvested from glypican-3 positive hepatocellular carcinoma, we have found specific clones having reactivity against glypican-3 and their TCR has been deciphered. Moreover, we have developed new algorithm to predicted peptides and neo-peptides from cancer patient samples, then checked their potential to induce CTLs by using HLA-Tg mouse model. We could improve epitope-prediction algorithm by our method.