[cv]

Cancer Immunotherapy

Activating antigen specific CD8+ cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) is a powerful strategy for killing cancer cells in vivo, and is a goal of many emerging cancer vaccines. The goal of this project is to use recombinant yeast as a vaccine platform to elicit a strong antigen specific CTL response to a tumor-specific antigen displayed on the yeast surface. Dr. Jianzhu ChenŐs lab (MIT) has developed a powerful mouse model in which all mice spontaneously develop prostate tumors carrying a specific antigenic epitope recognized by CTLs. This model system will be employed to engineer a yeast-based cancer vaccine, optimized to display the antigenic epitope and any necessary costimulatory molecules, to prevent tumor development and to monitor the CTL response in great detail.