A scFv Phage Display Mini Library Generated from the Immunoglobulin Repertoire of Breast Medullary Carcinoma Infiltrating B Lymphocytes

The detection and characterization of antigens expressed during the progression of carcinogenesis is still a major goal for tumour immunology. We describe a possible new way for defining human tumour specific antigens with the use of scFv phage display technology [1]. An attractive hypothesis is that tumour infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL) are accumulated in the tumour tissue because of their unique capacity for recognizing tumour cells [2]. This has been proved in the case of tumour infiltrating T lymphocytes (TIL-T) [3, 4]. In contrast, knowledge about tumour infiltrating B lymphocytes (TIL-B) is very limited [5–7]. In this work we show data on the immunoglobulin repertoire expressed by TIL-B cells from medullary breast carcinoma (MBC). A detailed DNA sequence analysis of immunoglobulin heavy (VH) and light chain