Immunomics
MCTP staff have had articles on immunomics published in high-impact, peer-review journals such as The New England Journal of Medicine. Utilizing the ability of the body’s own immune system to detect cancer, researchers are working to develop better diagnostic and prognostic tests to assess cancer more accurately in patients. Our objectives are to:
- Develop diagnostic and prognostic autoantibody signatures for human disease
- Employ immunomic and proteomic technologies to interrogate human disease progression
A number of groups including our own have characterized mRNA expression profiles of solid tumors that are associated with patient survival. In addition to transcript levels, cancers of various-type have also been profiled using comparative genomic hybridization and proteomics approaches to analyze DNA and protein alterations, respectively. While these approaches may be useful for molecular sub-typing of resected or biopsied tumors, non-invasive methods to detect and predict clinical outcome would be preferable. Several groups are employing proteomic approaches on serum to identify biomarkers for the early detection and prognosis of cancer. This is a daunting challenge, as this requires identification of relatively low abundant proteins in a complex mixture of highly abundant proteins such as albumin.
One approach to circumvent the need to detect low abundant cancer biomarkers is to take advantage of the body’s endogenous immune response to the tumor. The idea that there is an immune response to cancer in humans has been demonstrated by the identification of autoantibodies against a number of intracellular antigens in patients with various tumor types. This phenomenon is known as the humoral response and the detection of such autoantibodies has been shown to be of great diagnostic and prognostic value in the detection of cancer and the ability to predict the course of the disease.
Our group has employed phage-peptide microarrays to characterize autoantibody signatures that may be useful in the detection or screening for prostate cancer. The center will focus on extending this global immunomics approach to many different cancers as well as other human diseases.
