Prostate cancer specific cell-mediated immunotherapy utilizing dendritic cells pulsed with prostate-specific antigen

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Prostate cancer is a significant and growing health problem in the Japanese population, and hormone-refractory disease is known to be highly resistant to the conventional radiotherapy and/or chemotherapy. Therefore, it is important to develop an alternative strategy to treat hormone-refractory prostate cancer patients. Prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA), which is a transmembrane glycoprotein predominantly expressed in prostate cancer, is an attractive target for tumor-specific immunotherapy. Because HLA-A24 is the most common MHC class 1 allele among Japanese population, it is of great interest to identify HLA-A24-restricted epitope peptides from PSMA for further application of the dendritic cells (DC)-based immunotherapy targeting of prostate cancer. To identify HLA-A24-restricted epitope peptides, several PSMA-encoded HLA-A24 binding peptides were designed and screened for their capabilities to elicit specific antitumor cytotoxic T-lymphocytes response. These epitopes would be utilized to further evaluate the clinical utility of DC-based immunotherapeutic strategies for treatment of hormone-refractory prostate cancers.