Vaccination of a melanoma patient with mature dendritic cells pulsed with MAGE-3 peptides triggers the activity of nonvaccine anti-tumor cells

J Carrasco, A Van Pel, B Neyns, B Lethé… - The Journal of …, 2008 - journals.aai.org
J Carrasco, A Van Pel, B Neyns, B Lethé, F Brasseur, N Renkvist, P Van Der Bruggen
The Journal of Immunology, 2008journals.aai.org
We previously characterized the CTL response of a melanoma patient who experienced
tumor regression following vaccination with an ALVAC virus coding for a MAGE-A3 Ag.
Whereas anti-vaccine CTL were rare in the blood and inside metastases of this patient, anti-
tumor CTL recognizing other tumor Ags, mainly MAGE-C2, were 100 times more frequent in
the blood and considerably enriched in metastases following vaccination. In this study we
report the analysis of the CTL response of a second melanoma patient who showed a mixed …
Abstract
We previously characterized the CTL response of a melanoma patient who experienced tumor regression following vaccination with an ALVAC virus coding for a MAGE-A3 Ag. Whereas anti-vaccine CTL were rare in the blood and inside metastases of this patient, anti-tumor CTL recognizing other tumor Ags, mainly MAGE-C2, were 100 times more frequent in the blood and considerably enriched in metastases following vaccination. In this study we report the analysis of the CTL response of a second melanoma patient who showed a mixed tumor response after vaccination with dendritic cells pulsed with two MAGE-A3 antigenic peptides presented, respectively, by HLA-A1 and HLA-DP4. Anti-MAGE-3. A1 CD8 and anti-MAGE-3. DP4 CD4 T cells became detectable in the blood after vaccination at a frequency of∼ 10− 5 among the CD8 or CD4 T cells, respectively, and they were slightly enriched in slowly progressing metastases. Additional anti-tumor CTL were present in the blood at a frequency of 2× 10− 4 among the CD8 T cells and, among these, an anti-MAGE-C2 CTL clone was detected only following vaccination and was enriched by> 1,000-fold in metastases relative to the blood. The striking similarity of these results with our previous observations further supports the hypothesis that the induction of a few anti-vaccine T cells may prime or restimulate additional anti-tumor T cell clones that are mainly responsible for the tumor regression.
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