Department Biosciences, Biotechnologies & Biopharmaceutics, University of Bari, Bari, Italy.
Immunotherapy. 2014;6(1):35-41. doi: 10.2217/imt.13.144.
Notwithstanding a renewed interest in the application of immunotherapy as an alternative to chemotherapy and radiotherapy for the treatment of ovarian cancer (OC), and in spite of the available knowledge about ovarian tumor-associated-antigens, the search for a vaccine against OC remains a scientific and clinical challenge. Likewise, immunodiagnostics can detect only a late stage of the disease. Thus, the development of new therapeutic and diagnostic options is highly desirable.
Based on the low-similarity hypothesis, which supports the concept that immunogenicity is preferentially associated to sequences with no/low-similarity to the host proteome, and using Protein Information Resource peptide match program, we searched the ovarian tumor antigen CA125 for amino acid sequences unique to CA125 and absent in the remaining human proteins.
RESULTS & CONCLUSION: We identified a set of 159 pentapeptides unique to CA125 that might be used to design specific and effective immunological tools for diagnosis and treatment of OC.
尽管人们对免疫疗法作为化疗和放疗的替代品应用于治疗卵巢癌（OC）重新产生了兴趣，并且尽管已经了解了卵巢肿瘤相关抗原，但寻找针对 OC 的疫苗仍然是一个科学和临床挑战。同样，免疫诊断只能检测到疾病的晚期。因此，非常需要开发新的治疗和诊断选择。
基于低相似性假设，该假设支持这样一种概念，即免疫原性优先与与宿主蛋白质组无/低相似性的序列相关联，并且使用 Protein Information Resource 肽匹配程序，我们搜索了卵巢肿瘤抗原 CA125 的氨基酸序列，这些序列是 CA125 所特有的，而在其余人类蛋白质中不存在。
我们鉴定了一组 159 个独特的 CA125 五肽，这些五肽可能用于设计针对 OC 的诊断和治疗的特异性和有效的免疫工具。
