Elucidating the immunological effects of 5-azacytidine treatment in patients with myelodysplastic syndrome and identifying new conditional ligands and T-cell epitopes of relevance in melanoma.

Elucidating the immunological effects of 5-azacytidine treatment in patients with myelodysplastic syndrome and identifying new conditional ligands and T-cell epitopes of relevance in melanoma. Dan Med J. 2015 Aug;62(8):B5144 Authors: Frøsig TM Abstract This review is focused on research within three different areas of tumor immunology: discovery of new T-cell epitopes and a new immunological antigen (reported in Paper I and II), elucidation of the immunological effects of treatment with a hypomethylating drug (reported in Paper III) and discovery of new conditional ligands (reported in Paper IV). Many melanoma-associated T-cell epitopes have been described, but 45% of these are restricted to human leukocyte antigen (HLA)-A2, leaving the remaining 36 different HLA molecules with only a few described T-cell epitopes each. Therefore we wanted to expand the number of T-cell epitopes restricted to HLA-A1, -A3, -A11 and -B7, all HLA molecules frequently expressed in Caucasians in Western Europe and Northern America. In Paper I we focused on the proteins gp100, Mart1, MAGE-A3, NY-ESO-1, tyrosinase and TRP-2, all melanoma-associated antigens frequently recognized by T cells from HLA-A2 patients. On contrary, in Paper II we wanted to investigate the protein Nodal as a novel immunological target. We took advantage of a T-cell epitope mapping platform in which HLA ligands are predicted by computer-based algorithms, further tested in the labora...
Source: Danish Medical Journal - Category: Journals (General) Tags: Dan Med J Source Type: research