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Human papillomavirus (HPV) has been identified as the primary etiologic factor of cervical cancer, and subsets of anogenital and oropharyngeal cancers. HPV18 is the second most prevalent high-risk HPV type after HPV16. Furthermore, HPV18 is responsible for approximately 12% of cervical squamous cell carcinoma and 37% of cervical adenocarcinoma cases worldwide. In this study, we aimed to characterize...
Immunotherapy has emerged as a promising treatment strategy for the control of HPV-associated malignancies. Various therapeutic HPV vaccines have elicited potent antigen-specific CD8+ T cell mediated antitumor immune responses in preclinical models and are currently being tested in several clinical trials. Recent evidence indicates the importance of local immune activation, and higher number of immune...
Immunotherapy has emerged as a promising approach that can be used in conjunction with conventional chemotherapy and radiotherapy to further improve the survival rate of patients with advanced cancer. We have recently shown in previous studies that chemotherapy and radiation therapy can alter the tumor microenvironment and allow intratumoral vaccination to prime the adaptive immune system leading...
Merkel cell carcinoma (MCC) is a rare but devastating skin disease that is increasing in incidence within the United States. The poor prognosis of MCC patients and limited understanding of MCC pathogenesis warrants innovative treatments to control MCC. Several lines of evidence have pointed to Merkel cell polyomavirus (MCPyV) as the etiological agent of MCC. In particular, the amino terminus of MCPyV...
It is now clear that CD8+ T cells are crucial for therapeutic immunity against chronic viral infections and/or tumors. We reason that a strategy capable of improving CD8+ T cell activation would improve the efficacy of protein-based vaccines, which predominantly generate CD4+ T cell-mediated responses. Herein, we explore the ability of a novel cell-penetrating peptide (CPP), LAH4, to facilitate intracellular...
Protein-based vaccines have emerged as a potentially promising approach for the generation of antigen-specific immune responses. However, due to their low immunogenicity, there is a need for innovative approaches to enhance protein-based vaccine potency. One approach to enhance protein-based vaccine potency is the employment of toll-like receptor ligands, such as CpG oligonucleotides, to activate...
DNA vaccines contribute to a promising new approach for the generation of cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL). DNA vaccines do have several disadvantages, including poor immunogenicity and oncogene expression. We used the natural killer T-cell (NKT) ligand α-galactosylceramide (α-GalCer) as an adjuvant to prime initial DNA vaccination; and used the potent immune-stimulatory tumor antigen-expressing dendritic...
New innovative therapies are urgently required in order to combat the high mortality and morbidity associated with advanced cancers. Antigen-specific cancer immunotherapy using peptide-based vaccination has emerged as an attractive approach for the control of cancers due to its simplicity and easy preparation. However, such an approach requires the employment of suitable adjuvants. In the current...
DNA vaccines are an attractive approach to eliciting antigen-specific immunity. Intracellular targeting of tumor antigens through its linkage to immunostimulatory molecules such as calreticulin (CRT) can improve antigen processing and presentation through the MHC class I pathway and increase cytotoxic CD8+ T cell production. However, even with these enhancements, the efficacy of such immunotherapeutic...
DNA vaccines have emerged as a potential alternative to current strategies to control cancer for their safety, stability and ease of preparation. We have previously demonstrated that a DNA vaccine encoding calreticulin (CRT) linked to human papillomavirus type 16 (HPV-16) E7 antigen (CRT/E7) can generate significant E7-specific immune responses and antitumor effects in vaccinated mice, thus enhancing...
Therapeutic human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines targeting E6 and/or E7 antigens represent an opportunity to control HPV-associated lesions. We have previously generated several therapeutic DNA vaccines targeting HPV-16 E7 antigen and generated significant antitumor effects. Since regulatory T cells (Tregs) play an important role in suppressing immune responses against tumors by immunotherapy, such...
Ovarian cancer is one of the leading causes of death from gynecological cancers in the United States. Conventional therapies are unlikely to control advanced stage ovarian cancers, thus requiring innovative alternative therapies. In the current study, we characterized the therapeutic effect of tumor cell-based vaccines combined with the adjuvant, α-galactosylceramide (α-GalCer) using two different...
There is currently a vital need for the development of novel therapeutic strategies for the control of advanced stage cancers. Antigen-specific immunotherapy and the employment of antibodies against the death receptor 5 (DR5) have emerged as two potentially promising strategies for cancer treatment. In the current study, we hypothesize that the combination of treatment with the anti-DR5 monoclonal...
Cervical cancer is one of the most common cancers in women worldwide. Persistent infection with human papillomavirus (HPV) is considered to be the etiological factor for cervical cancer. Therefore, an effective vaccine against HPV infections may lead to the control of cervical cancer. An ideal HPV vaccine should aim to generate both humoral immune response to prevent new infections as well as cell-mediated...
Intradermal vaccination via gene gun efficiently delivers DNA vaccines into dendritic cells (DCs) of the skin, resulting in the activation and priming of antigen-specific T cells in vivo. We have previously demonstrated that intradermal delivery of DNA vaccines encoding single-chain trimer (SCT) composed of the most immunogenic epitope of human papillomavirus type 16 (HPV-16) E6 protein (aa49-57),...
Mesothelin is highly expressed in a majority of ovarian cancer cells and is expressed at low levels in normal cells. Therefore, mesothelin represents a potential target antigen for ovarian cancer vaccine development. DNA vaccines employing single-chain trimers (SCT) have been shown to bypass antigen processing and presentation and result in significant enhancement of DNA vaccine potency. In the current...
Antigen-specific cancer immunotherapy and antiangiogenesis are feasible strategies for cancer therapy because they can potentially treat systemic tumors at multiple sites in the body while discriminating between neoplastic and non-neoplastic cells. We have previously developed a DNA vaccine encoding calreticulin (CRT) linked to human papillomavirus-16 E7 and have found that this vaccine generates...
Vaccinia vaccines have become important vectors for antigen-specific immunotherapy. Calreticulin has been shown to enhance MHC class I presentation of linked peptide/protein and may be useful for antigen-specific cancer treatment. An innovative vaccine administering antigen linked to calreticulin via a vaccinia vector may generate a potent antigen-specific antitumor response. We tested the efficacy...
DNA vaccines have emerged as an attractive approach for antigen-specific cancer immunotherapy. We have previously linked Mycobacterium tuberculosis heat shock protein 70 (HSP70) to human papillomavirus type 16 (HPV-16) E7 in the context of a DNA vaccine. Vaccination with DNA encoding E7/HSP70 has generated a dramatic increase of E7-specific CD8+ T cell precursors and a strong antitumor effect against...
We have previously linked the sorting signals of the lysosome-associated membrane protein-1 (LAMP-1) to HPV-16 E7 antigen, creating a chimera, Sig/E7/LAMP-1. We found that both Sig/E7/LAMP-1-containing recombinant vaccinia virus (Vac-Sig/E7/LAMP-1) and Sig/E7/LAMP-1 DNA can generate strong antitumor immunity. To determine whether combination of Sig/E7/LAMP-1 DNA and Vac-Sig/E7/LAMP-1 can further enhance...
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