The Ability of Variant Peptides to Reverse the Nonresponsiveness of T Lymphocytes to the Wild-Type Sequence p53264–272 Epitope

Abstract Recently, we observed that CTL specific for the wild-type (wt) sequence p53264–272 peptide could only be expanded ex vivo from PBMC of a subset of the HLA-A2.1+ normal donors or cancer patients tested. Surprisingly, the tumors of the responsive patients expressed normal levels of wt p53 and could be considered unlikely to present this epitope. In contrast, tumors of nonresponsive patients accumulated mutant p53 and were more likely to present this epitope. We sought to increase the responsive rate to the wt p53264–272 peptide of PBMC obtained from normal donors and patients by identifying more immunogenic variants of this peptide. Two such variants were generated by amino acid exch…