MART-1 Fragment – Other Categories

Tumour antigens recognised by cytotoxic T cells (CTLs) are a keen area of research to develop antigen-specific cancer therapies. However, hurdles are weak immunogenicity and high rates of degradation in vivo. In the search for a melanoma vaccine, the human tumour antigen Melan-A/MART-1 (27-35) has been used as a model to design peptides with improved characteristics for use in anti-tumour vaccines. The MART-1 fragment provided here has an alanine substituted at position one from MART-1 (27-35) this is a natural variant of MART-1 found in the population. Melan-A specific CTL assays showed this MART-1 fragment A27L to be a superagonist with higher affinity than the parent peptide. Also, the MART-1 fragment is a more stable complex with HLA-A*0201 than the parent peptide as determined by degradation experiments using a functional cytolytic assay. The superagonist activity of the MART-1 fragment and the stability of the peptide may be a considerable step towards an anti-melanoma vaccine.