Image courtesy of NIAID
Researchers say they have developed a test that can reveal how the immune system would respond to vaccines for leukemia.
To conduct this test, cancer-specific-proteins are spotted onto a microscope slide.
They are then incubated with a patient blood sample to show whether the immune system can recognize the proteins.
The researchers believe this test could inform immunotherapy trial development and eventually direct the treatment of leukemia.
They described the test in PLOS ONE.
The team explained that cellular arrays using peptide-MHC (pMHC) tetramers allow the simultaneous detection of different antigen-specific T-cell populations that are naturally circulating in leukemia patients and healthy individuals.
The researchers developed a pMHC array to detect CD8+ T-cell populations in leukemia patients that recognize epitopes within viral antigens and leukemia antigens.
Experiments showed this test was at least as sensitive as flow cytometry.
The pMHC array successfully identified more than 40 T-cell populations. It identified T cells that recognized various tumor antigen epitopes in patients with acute myeloid leukemia and acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
“This [test] would allow us to know how good a patients’ immune system is and potentially which proteins their immune system will react to, allowing us to prioritize which proteins we use to develop anticancer vaccines,” said study author Barbara Guinn, PhD, of the University of Southampton in the UK.
“In the future, we may be able to monitor patient immune responses as they are treated in clinical trials, helping us to direct the immune system more efficiently against cancer cells.”
Dr Guinn has spent a large part of her career investigating the differences between cancer cells and normal cells in terms of the proteins they make. She has been able to identify a number of proteins that are overexpressed in tumor cells but not healthy cells.
“Some of these proteins act as biomarkers for patient survival,” she said, “and some of them have helped us understand more about how cancer develops in subgroups of patients with leukemia.”
