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
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