Using in silico transcriptomics to search for tumor-associated antigens for immunotherapy

Immunotherapy. approaches to fight cancer are based on the principle of mou nting an immune response against a self-antigen expressed by the tumor cell s. In order to reduce potential autoimmunity side-effects, the antigens use d should be as tumor-specific as possible. A complementary approach to expe rimental tumor antigen discovery is to screen the human genome in silico, p articularly the databases of "Expressed Sequence Tags" (ESTs). in search of tumor-specific and tumor-associated antigens. The public databases current ly provide a massive amount of ESTs from several hundreds of cDNA tissue li braries, including tumoral tissues from various types. We describe a novel method of EST database screening that allows new potential tumor-associated genes to be efficiently selected. The resulting list of candidates is enri ched in known genes, described as being expressed in tumor cells. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.