Drug to reveal immunotherapy target in tissues from prostate cancer patients
October 2016
University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA
Prostate cancer (PC) remains the most common cancer and the second leading cause of cancer-related death in men. Expanding cancer immunotherapies to a broader range of patients could be achieved through novel target identification and vaccine development. An ideal tumor antigen is one to which the immune system is naïve and whose expression can be persistently induced in tumor cells. One class of TAAs that meet these criteria are the cancer testis antigens (CTAs) which expression can be specifically increased using epigenetic modifying agents (EMAs). In the present study, the researchers wanted to determine the expression pattern and inducibility of CTAs in human PC. Expression patterns of 29 potentially immunologically relevant CTAs were evaluated in 5 PC cell lines. This expression pattern varied across different CTAs and was at least partially related to the androgen sensitivity of these cell lines. Human PC biopsies showed almost no expression of CTAs at baseline but it could be significantly induced following treatment with EMAs. Gene expression analysis of CTAs in circulating tumor cells further identified a subset of patients with metastatic PC that could benefit from vaccines targeting CTAs. These results identify a translational paradigm in which combining EMAs with CTA-targeted vaccines in patients with PC can enhance immune-mediated tumor lysis.
Inducible expression of cancer-testis antigens in human prostate cancer
Joshua M. Lang
Added on: 09-19-2021
[1] https://www.oncotarget.com/article/12711/text/[2] https://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset/352f7dfd-05cf-434b-a96a-7e270dc76573
