Peptide Processing Is Critical for T-Cell Memory Inflation and May Be Optimized to Improve Immune Protection by CMV-Based Vaccine Vectors.
Cytomegalovirus (CMV) elicits long-term T-cell immunity of unparalleled strength, which has allowed the development of highly protective CMV-based vaccine vectors. Counterintuitively, experimental vaccines encoding a single MHC-I restricted epitope offered better immune protection than those expressing entire proteins, including the same epitope. To clarify this conundrum, we generated recombinant murine CMVs (MCMVs) encoding well-characterized MHC-I epitopes at different positions within viral genes and observed strong immune responses and protection against viruses and tumor growth when the epitopes were expressed at the protein C-terminus. We used the M45-encoded conventional epitope HGI…
The sharedneoantigen landscape of MSI cancers reflects immunoediting during tumor evolution
AbstractThe immune system can recognize and attack cancer cells, especially those with a high load of mutation-inducedneoantigens. Suchneoantigens are particularly abundant in DNA mismatch repair (MMR)-deficient, microsatellite-unstable (MSI) cancers. MMR deficiency leads to insertion/deletion (indel) mutations at coding microsatellites (cMS) and toneoantigen-inducing translational frameshifts. The abundance of mutationalneoantigens renders MSI cancers sensitive to immune checkpoint blockade. However, the neoantigen landscape of MMR-deficient cancers has not yet been systematically mapped. In the present study, we used a novel tool to monitorneoantigen-inducing indel mutations in MSI colore…
The shared frameshift mutation landscape of microsatellite-unstable cancers suggests immunoediting during tumor evolution
The immune system can recognize and attack cancer cells, especially those with a high load of mutation-induced neoantigens. Such neoantigens are abundant in DNA mismatch repair (MMR)-deficient, microsatellite-unstable (MSI) cancers. MMR deficiency leads to insertion/deletion (indel) mutations at coding microsatellites (cMS) and to neoantigen-inducing translational frameshifts. Here, we develop a tool to quantify frameshift mutations in MSI colorectal and endometrial cancer. Our results show that frameshift mutation frequency is negatively correlated to the predicted immunogenicity of the resulting peptides, suggesting counterselection of cell clones with highly immunogenic frameshift peptid…
Abstract 571: The shared mutation and neoantigen landscape of MMR-deficient colorectal cancers suggests immunoediting during tumor evolution
Abstract The immune system can recognize and attack cancer cells and their precursors, especially those with a high load of mutation-induced neoantigens. Such neoantigens are particularly abundant in DNA mismatch repair (MMR)-deficient cancers. MMR deficiency results in microsatellite instability (MSI), which leads to multiple insertion/deletion mutations at coding microsatellites and to neoantigen-inducing translational frameshifts. The significance of immune selection and immunoediting potentially shaping the neoantigen landscape during the progression from premalignant MMR-deficient lesions into cancers has not yet been analyzed. We hypothesized that the neoantigen landscape of MSI cance…
A non-functional neoepitope specific CD8+ T-cell response induced by tumor derived antigen exposure in vivo
Cancer-associated mutations, mostly single nucleotide variations, can act as neoepitopes and prime targets for effective anti-cancer T-cell immunity. T cells recognizing cancer mutations are critical for the clinical activity of immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) and they are potent vaccine antigens. High frequencies of mutation-specific T cells are rarely spontaneously induced. Hence, therapies that broaden the tumor specific T-cell response are of interest. Here, we analyzed neoepitope-specific CD8+ T-cell responses mounted either spontaneously or after immunotherapy regimens, which induce local tumor inflammation and cell death, in mice bearing tumors of the widely used colon carcinoma cel…