The immunoinformatics of cancer immunotherapy

Abstract

We review here the developments in the field of immunoinformatics and their present and potential applications to the immunotherapeutic treatment of cancer. Antigen presentation plays a central role in the immune response, and as a result in immunotherapeutic methods such as adoptive T-cell transfer and antitumor vaccination. We therefore extensively review the current technologies of antigen presentation prediction, including the next generation predictors, which combine proteasomal processing, transporter associated with antigen processing and major histocompatibility complex (MHC)-binding prediction. Minor histocompatibility antigens are also relevant targets for immunotherapy, and we review the current systems available, SNEP and SiPep. Here, antigen presentation plays a key role, but additional types of data are also incorporated, such as single nucleotide polymorphism data and tissue/cell-type expression data. Current systems are not capable of handling the concept of immunodominance, which is critical to immunotherapy, but efforts have been made to model general aspects of the immune system. Although tough challenges lie ahead, when measuring the field of immunoinformatics on its contributions thus far, one can expect fruitful developments in the future.