Vaccination with a Melan-A peptide selects an oligoclonal T cell population with increased functional avidity and tumor reactivity.

Increased Functional Avidity and Tumor an Oligoclonal T Cell Population with Vaccination with a Melan-A Peptide Selects

Impact of orthologous melan-A peptide immunizations on the anti-self melan-A/HLA-A2 T cell cross-reactivity.

In HLA-A2 individuals, the CD8 T cell response against the differentiation Ag Melan-A is mainly directed toward the peptide Melan-A26-35. The murine Melan-A24-33 sequence encodes a peptide that is identical with the human Melan-A26-35 decamer, except for a Thr-to-Ile substitution at the penultimate position. Here, we show that the murine Melan-A24-33 is naturally processed and presented by HLA-...

Cancer Immunity 2:7 (2002) - ARTICLE

Recent studies in mouse models have suggested that genetic transfer of tumor antigen-specific high affinity T cell receptors (TCR) into host lymphocytes could be a viable strategy for the rapid induction of tumor-specific immunity. A previously proposed approach for the isolation of such TCRs consists in circumventing tolerance to self-restricting HLA/peptide complexes by deriving them from PMB...

Manipulation of avidity to improve effectiveness of adoptively transferred CD8(+) T cells for melanoma immunotherapy in human MHC class I-transgenic mice.

The adoptive transfer of tumor-reactive CD8(+) T cells into tumor-bearing hosts provides an attractive alternative to vaccination-based active immunotherapy of melanoma. The development of techniques that result in the preferential expansion of tumor-reactive T cells is therefore of great importance. In this study, we report the generation of HLA-A*0201-restricted CD8(+) T cell populations that...

Characterization of Melan-A reactive memory CD8+ T cells in a healthy donor.

Melan-A specific CD8+ T cells are thought to play an important role against the development of melanoma. Their in vivo expansion is often observed with advanced disease. In recent years, low levels of Melan-A reactive CD8+ T cells have also been found in HLA-A2 healthy donors, but these cells harbor naive characteristics and are thought to be mostly cross-reactive for the Melan-A antigen. Here,...