Elsevier

Genomics

Volume 94, Issue 3, September 2009, Pages 153-160
Genomics

Identification of FAM46D as a novel cancer/testis antigen using EST data and serological analysis

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ygeno.2009.06.001Get rights and content
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Abstract

Cancer/testis Antigens (CTAs) are immunogenic proteins with a restricted expression pattern in normal tissues and aberrant expression in different types of tumors being considered promising candidates for immunotherapy. We used the alignment between EST sequences and the human genome sequence to identify novel CT genes. By examining the EST tissue composition of known CT clusters we defined parameters for the selection of 1184 EST clusters corresponding to putative CT genes. The expression pattern of 70 CT gene candidates was evaluated by RT-PCR in 21 normal tissues, 17 tumor cell lines and 160 primary tumors. We were able to identify 4 CT genes expressed in different types of tumors. The presence of antibodies against the protein encoded by 1 of these 4 CT genes (FAM46D) was exclusively detected in plasma samples from cancer patients. Due to its restricted expression pattern and immunogenicity FAM46D represents a novel target for cancer immunotherapy.

Keywords

Tumor antigens
Immunotherapy
Gene expression profiling
ESTs
FAM46D

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Sequence data from this article have been deposited with the DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank Data Libraries under Accession Nos. EF537578, EF537579, EF537580, EF537581 and EF537582.