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The Shaping of a Polyvalent and Highly Individual T-Cell Repertoire in the Bone Marrow of Breast Cancer Patients

¹ Department of Cellular Immunology, The German Cancer Research Center, and ² Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics, The University Hospital of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany

Requests for reprints: Philipp Beckhove, Department of Cellular Immunology, The German Cancer Research Center, INF 280, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany. Phone: 49-6221-423745; Fax: 49-6221-423702; E-mail: p.beckhove{at}dkfz.de.

We analyzed the T-cell repertoires from the bone marrow of 39 primary operated breast cancer patients and 11 healthy female donors for the presence and frequencies of spontaneously induced effector/memory T lymphocytes with peptide-HLA-A2-restricted reactivity against 10 breast tumor-associated antigens (TAA) and 3 normal breast tissue–associated antigens by short-term IFN- enzyme-linked immunospot (ELISpot) analysis. Sixty-seven percent of the patients recognized TAAs with a mean frequency of 144 TAA reactive cells per 10⁶ T cells. These patients recognized simultaneously an average of 47% of the tested TAAs. The T-cell repertoire was highly polyvalent and exhibited pronounced interindividual differences in the pattern of TAAs recognized by each patient. Strong differences of reactivity were noticed between TAAs, ranging from 100% recognition of prostate-specific antigen_p141-149 to only 25% recognition of MUC1_p12-20 or Her-2/neu_p369-377. In comparison with TAAs, reactivity to normal breast tissue–associated antigens was lower with respect to the proportions of responding patients (30%) and recognized antigens (27%), with a mean frequency of only 85/10⁶ T cells. Healthy individuals also contained TAA-reactive T cells but this repertoire was more restricted and the frequencies were in the same range as T cells reacting to normal breast tissue–associated antigens. Our data show a highly individual T-cell repertoire for recognition of TAAs in breast cancer patients. This has potential relevance for T-cell immune diagnostics, for tumor vaccine design, and for predicting immune responsiveness. (Cancer Res 2006; 66(16): 8258-65)

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