Cancer Immunol Res: Identify new potential targets for the development of new melanoma therapies.

6, 2020 // -- In a recent study published in the international journal Cancer Immunology Research, scientists from Monash University and others discovered a special new marker, HLA-related peptides, in the expression of melanin tumors, which could help researchers develop new vaccines to fight melanoma.
Photo Source: CC0 Public Domain Despite the progress scientists have made in melanoma therapy, one Australian melanoma patient dies every five hours without effective treatment, a new treatment that identifies tumor cells Surface-decorated small tumor-specific protein fragments (peptides) to regulate the body's own immune system to help detect and kill tumor cells, the researchers in the article successfully identified thousands of special peptides on the surface of melanoma tumors, which can be identified by the host immune system.
-related findings have rapid clinical application value, and researchers are now working together on clinical inoculation trials of melanoma patients using a patchwork peptide; researcher Woods notes that melanoma closely monitors the immune system of host bodies under different growth conditions, and that the many melanoma peptides we found in this study are surprising and exciting.
results show that some melanoma peptide markers can be produced through a shearing process, in which the protein is first cut into small fragments of peptides, and then the two fragments are pasted together to form a "spliced peptide", by identifying specific shear peptides, which can be synthesized in vitro, and then infused into the patient's body to induce the immune system to identify and target special tumors.
The researchers' goal was to find a target for the development of new melanoma therapies, which they had not previously known about the presence, prevalence and importance of these special splicing peptides, or whether they would be recognized by the body's immune system, and now they have discovered these splicing peptides, which they hope will use as bait to induce the host immune system to function.
researcher Andreas Behren points out that the findings of this paper are very exciting that we are now able to identify specific melanoma stitching peptide molecules in patients with different immunogenics, and based on previous research, the splicing peptide antigen has now changed from an curiosity point in previous immunological studies to a new operational target, not only in melanoma studies, but in other cancer studies. The same is true in the field; based on new workflows developed by researchers, they can now identify previously neglected peptide molecules, which may have laid the groundwork for the development of late-stage immunotherapy and new cancer vaccines, and in fact, the prevalence of this shearing process points to a particular class of antigens that play a key role in the development of infectious, autoimmune and allergic diseases.
() Original source: Pouya Faridi, Katherine Woods, Simone Ostrouska, et al. Spliced Peptides and Cytokine-Driven Changes in the Immunopeptidome of Melanoma, Cancer Immunology Research. (2020) DOI: 10.1158/2326-6066.CIR-19-0894.