0000000000437837
AUTHOR
C. J. M. Melief
T cell assays and MIATA: the essential minimum for maximum impact.
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, USA*Correspondence: cedrik.britten@tron-mainz.dehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.immuni.2012.07.010The field of immunology has recentlyexperienced enormous advances fromwhich most have so far not been incorpo-rated into standard medical practice (Da-vis, 2008). One approach to fully exploitthe existing wealth of knowledge is toimplement a systematic strategy to eval-uate the immune system. The potentialbenefit of such an approach is that itmay lead to results that can be translatedinto the rational development of diagnos-tics and therapeutics (Hoos et al., 2011).Two prerequisites for its application ar…
Circumventing tolerance to a human MDM2-derived tumor antigen by TCR gene transfer
We identified a tumor-associated cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) epitope derived from the widely expressed human MDM2 oncoprotein and were able to bypass self-tolerance to this tumor antigen in HLA-A*0201 (A2.1) transgenic mice and by generating A2.1-negative, allo-A2.1-restricted human T lymphocytes. A broad range of malignant, as opposed to nontransformed cells, were killed by high-avidity transgenic mouse and allogeneic human CTLs specific for the A2.1-presented MDM2 epitope. Whereas the self-A2.1-restricted human T cell repertoire gave rise only to low-avidity CTLs unable to recognize the natural MDM2 peptide, human A2.1+ T lymphocytes were turned into efficient MDM2-specific CTLs upon exp…
“MIATA”—Minimal Information about T Cell Assays
Immunotherapy, especially therapeutic vaccination, has a great deal of potential in the treatment of cancer and certain infectious diseases such as HIV (Allison et al., 2006; Fauci et al., 2008; Feldmann and Steinman, 2005). Numerous vaccine candidates have been tested in patients with a variety of tumor types and chronic viral diseases. Often, the best way to assess the clinical potential of these vaccines is to monitor the induced T cell response, and yet there are currently no standards for reporting these results. This letter is an effort to address this problem.