PD-1 or PD-L1 Blockade Restores Antitumor Efficacy Following SSX2 Epitope-Modified DNA Vaccine Immunization.

ABSTRACT: DNA vaccines have demonstrated antitumor efficacy in multiple preclinical models, but low immunogenicity has been observed in several human clinical trials. This has led to many approaches seeking to improve the immunogenicity of DNA vaccines. We previously reported that a DNA vaccine encoding the cancer-testis antigen SSX2, modified to encode altered epitopes with increased MHC class I affinity, elicited a greater frequency of cytolytic, multifunctional CD8(+) T cells in non-tumor-bearing mice. We sought to test whether this optimized vaccine resulted in increased antitumor activity in mice bearing an HLA-A2-expressing tumor engineered to express SSX2. We found that immunization of tumor-bearing mice with the optimized vaccine elicited a surprisingly inferior antitumor effect relative to

SUBMITTER: Rekoske BT 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4527948 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature