Enhancing cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) responses by directly loading CTL epitope vaccines onto MHC Class I complexes on the dendritic cell surface

项目摘要 细胞毒性T淋巴细胞（CTL）介导的免疫应答是免疫系统中的主要效应机制。 癌症和病毒感染的免疫疗法。疫苗能够增强CTL应答， 在实验室和临床环境中进行了深入研究。然而，疫苗之间存在很大差距， 这些疫苗的开发工作和效力。这一差距促使我们重新审视目前的疫苗接种 战略，并制定替代战略，以缩小差距。目前的策略依赖于树突内 细胞（DC）处理疫苗，由于该过程中嵌入的多个障碍，这是低效的。我们 因此旨在开发完全绕过DC内加工的独特疫苗接种策略。本 最后，根据我们的初步研究结果，我们建议开发一种免疫耐受的弹性蛋白样 基于多肽（iTEP）的融合物作为能够直接负载CTL表位的疫苗载体（CTL疫苗） 在DC表面的MHC I类复合物上。这些表位随后将被DC用于诱导 CTL应答。我们假设，融合将大大提高疫苗的有效性， 与需要DC内加工的疫苗相比。我们将设计和表征融合与 以下两个目的：目的1：体外检查ABD-iTEP-pMMP-表位融合物的功能。目标二： 建立体内ABD-iTEP-pMMP-表位融合的功能和作用。 考虑到CTL疫苗的重要性和当前的挑战，本发明的主要贡献在于： 提出的研究是，它探索了一种新的和直接的表位加载策略，以前所未有地加强 CTL疫苗诱导的应答。这种新颖而直接的策略可能会带来前所未有的 影响这些疫苗，使它们在免疫治疗和免疫治疗中发挥更决定性的作用。 预防癌症、感染和其他疾病。

Project summary Cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL)-mediated immune responses are the primary effector mechanism in immunotherapies against cancer and virus infection. Vaccines are able to boost CTL responses, and are being intensively pursued in the laboratory and clinical settings. However, there is a large gap between the vaccine development effort and the efficacy of these vaccines. This gap motivates us to reexamine current vaccination strategies and to develop an alternative strategy to close the gap. Current strategies rely on the intra-dendritic cell (DC) processing of vaccines, which is not efficient due to multiple barriers embedded in the process. We thus aim to develop a distinct vaccination strategy that completely bypasses the intra-DC processing. To this end, and based on our preliminary research results, we propose to develop an immune-tolerant elastin-like polypeptide (iTEP)-based fusion as a vaccine carrier that is able to directly load CTL epitopes (CTL vaccines) onto the MHC class I complexes on DC surfaces. These epitopes will be subsequently used by DCs to induce CTL responses. We hypothesize that the fusion will drastically boost the effectiveness of the vaccines as compared to vaccines requiring intra-DC processing. We will engineer and characterize the fusion with the following two aims: Aim 1: Examine functionalities of the ABD-iTEP-pMMP-epitope fusion in vitro. Aim 2: Establish functionalities and effects of the ABD-iTEP-pMMP-epitope fusion in vivo. In consideration of the importance and current challenges of CTL vaccines, the main contribution of this proposed study is that it explores a novel and a direct epitope loading strategy to unprecedentedly strengthen CTL vaccine-induced responses. This novel yet straightforward strategy may bring about an unprecedented impact on these vaccines, allowing them to play a more decisive role in the immunotherapy and immune preventions of cancer, infections, and other diseases.