Nature of tumour rejection antigens in ovarian cancer

Abstract

Major progress in the analysis of human immune responses to cancer has been made through the molecular characterization of human tumour antigens. The development of therapeutic strategies for eliciting immune-mediated rejection of tumours has accelerated due to the elucidation of the molecular basis for tumour cell recognition and destruction by immune cells. Of the various human tumour antigens defined to date in ovarian cancer, the cancer-testis (CT) family of antigens have been studied extensively preclinically and clinically because of their testis-restricted expression in normal tissues and ability to elicit robust immune responses. Recent developments in cancer sequencing technologies offer a unique opportunity to identify tumour mutations with the highest likelihood of being expressed and recognized by the immune system. Such mutations, or neoantigens, could potentially serve as specific immune targets for T-cell-mediated destruction of cancer cells. This review will highlight current work in selecting tumour rejection antigens in ovarian cancer for improving the efficacy of immunotherapy.

Keywords: antigen; immunotherapy; next-generation sequencing; ovarian cancer.

Figure 1

Expression pattern of 162 cancer‐testis (CT) genes across normal tissues from GTeX and patient tumour samples from TCGA. RNASeq data were obtained from GTeX (normal tissues) or TCGA PANCancer study (tumours). The median expression per each CT gene was calculated across all patients in a specific tissue. Each cell in the heatmap indicates the median expression of a CT gene in the tissue indicated at the bottom of the figure. Red cells indicate high expression and black cells low expression levels.