| First Author | Ercolini AM | Year | 2005 |
| Journal | J Exp Med | Volume | 201 |
| Issue | 10 | Pages | 1591-602 |
| PubMed ID | 15883172 | Mgi Jnum | J:101130 |
| Mgi Id | MGI:3590628 | Doi | 10.1084/jem.20042167 |
| Citation | Ercolini AM, et al. (2005) Recruitment of latent pools of high-avidity CD8(+) T cells to the antitumor immune response. J Exp Med 201(10):1591-602 |
| abstractText | A major barrier to successful antitumor vaccination is tolerance of high-avidity T cells specific to tumor antigens. In keeping with this notion, HER-2/neu (neu)-targeted vaccines, which raise strong CD8(+) T cell responses to a dominant peptide (RNEU(420-429)) in WT FVB/N mice and protect them from a neu-expressing tumor challenge, fail to do so in MMTV-neu (neu-N) transgenic mice. However, treatment of neu-N mice with vaccine and cyclophosphamide-containing chemotherapy resulted in tumor protection in a proportion of mice. This effect was specifically abrogated by the transfer of neu-N-derived CD4(+)CD25(+) T cells. RNEU(420-429)-specific CD8(+) T cells were identified only in neu-N mice given vaccine and cyclophosphamide chemotherapy which rejected tumor challenge. Tetramer-binding studies demonstrated that cyclophosphamide pretreatment allowed the activation of high-avidity RNEU(420-429)-specific CD8(+) T cells comparable to those generated from vaccinated FVB/N mice. Cyclophosphamide seemed to inhibit regulatory T (T reg) cells by selectively depleting the cycling population of CD4(+)CD25(+) T cells in neu-N mice. These findings demonstrate that neu-N mice possess latent pools of high-avidity neu-specific CD8(+) T cells that can be recruited to produce an effective antitumor response if T reg cells are blocked or removed by using approaches such as administration of cyclophosphamide before vaccination. |
