Department of Immunology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Cancer Immunol Res. 2017 May;5(5):347-354. doi: 10.1158/2326-6066.CIR-17-0112.
The question of whether human tumors express antigens that can be recognized by the immune system has been answered with a resounding YES. Most were identified through spontaneous antitumor humoral and cellular immune responses found in cancer patients and include peptides, glycopeptides, phosphopeptides, viral peptides, and peptides resulting from common mutations in oncogenes and tumor-suppressor genes, or common gene fusion events. Many have been extensively tested as candidates for anticancer vaccines. More recently, attention has been focused on the potentially large number of unique tumor antigens, mutated neoantigens, that are the predicted products of the numerous mutations revealed by exome sequencing of primary tumors. Only a few have been confirmed as targets of spontaneous immunity and immunosurveillance, and even fewer have been tested in preclinical and clinical settings. The field has been divided for a long time on the relative importance of shared versus mutated antigens in tumor surveillance and as candidates for vaccines. This question will eventually need to be answered in a head to head comparison in well-designed clinical trials. One advantage that shared antigens have over mutated antigens is their potential to be used in vaccines for primary cancer prevention. .
人体肿瘤是否表达可被免疫系统识别的抗原这个问题的答案是肯定的。这些抗原大多数是通过在癌症患者中发现的自发抗肿瘤体液和细胞免疫反应识别出来的，包括肽、糖肽、磷酸肽、病毒肽以及致癌基因和抑癌基因突变或常见基因融合事件产生的肽。其中许多已被广泛测试作为抗癌疫苗的候选物。最近，人们的注意力集中在大量独特的肿瘤抗原上，这些抗原是原发性肿瘤外显子组测序揭示的众多突变的预测产物，即新抗原。只有少数被确认为自发免疫和免疫监视的靶点，更少的被用于临床前和临床研究。长期以来，人们一直在共享抗原和突变抗原在肿瘤监测和疫苗候选物中的相对重要性问题上存在分歧。这个问题最终需要在精心设计的临床试验中进行直接比较来回答。与突变抗原相比，共享抗原的一个优势是它们有可能用于原发性癌症预防的疫苗。
