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Updated: Aug 21, 2026
Development of Compendium for Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma
Published on: April 12, 2024
Proliferation potential-related protein, an ideal esophageal cancer antigen for immunotherapy, identified using
Yoshihiro Yoshitake1, Tetsuya Nakatsura, Mikio Monji
1Department of Immunogenetics, Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Kumamoto University, Kumamoto, Japan.
Purpose:
To establish effective antitumor immunotherapy for esophageal cancer, we tried to identify an useful target antigen of esophageal cancer.
Experimental Design:
We did cDNA microarray analysis to find a novel candidate antigen, proliferation potential-related protein (PP-RP). We examined cytotoxicity against tumor cells in vitro and in vivo of CTLs specific to PP-RP established from esophageal cancer patients.
Results:
In 26 esophageal cancer tissues, an average of relative ratio of the expression of the PP-RP mRNA in cancer cells versus adjacent normal esophageal tissues was 396.2. Immunohistochemical analysis revealed that, in 20 of the 22 esophageal cancer tissues, PP-RP protein was strongly expressed only in the cancer cells and not so in normal esophageal epithelial cells. PP-RP protein contains 10 epitopes recognized by HLA-A24-restricted CTLs. These CTLs, generated from HLA-A24-positive esophageal cancer patients, had cytotoxic activity against cancer cell lines positive for both PP-RP and HLA-A24. Furthermore, adoptive transfer of the PP-RP-specific CTL line inhibited the growth of a human esophageal cancer cell line engrafted in nude mice.
Conclusions:
The expression of PP-RP in esophageal cancer cells was significantly higher than in normal cells, and the CTLs recognizing PP-RP killed tumor cells in vitro and also showed tumor rejection effects in a xenograft model. Therefore, PP-RP may prove to be an ideal tumor antigen useful for diagnosis and immunotherapy for patients with esophageal cancer. cDNA microarray analysis is a useful method to identify ideal tumor-associated antigens.