Heat Shock Protein Vaccines Against Cancer

Vaccination of mice with heat shock proteins (HSPs) derived from a tumor makes the mice resistant to the tumor from which the HSP was obtained. This phenomenon has been demonstrated with three HSPs--gp96, hsp90, and hsp70. Vaccination with HSPs also elicits antigen-specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs). The specific immunogenicity of HSPs derives apparently, not from the HSPs per se, but from the peptides bound to them. These observations provide the basis for a new generation of vaccines against cancer. The HSP-based cancer vaccines circumvent two of the most intractable hurdles to cancer immunotherapy. One of them is the possibility that human cancers, like cancers of experimental anima…