Blood immune cells as potential biomarkers predicting relapse-free survival of stage III/IV resected melanoma patients treated with peptide-based vaccination and interferon-alpha.

Introduction: Despite the recent approval of several therapies in the adjuvant setting of melanoma, tumor relapse still occurs in a significant number of completely resected stage III-IV patients. In this context, the use of cancer vaccines is still relevant and may increase the response to immune checkpoint inhibitors. We previously demonstrated safety, immunogenicity and preliminary evidence of clinical efficacy in stage III/IV resected melanoma patients subjected to a combination therapy based on peptide vaccination together with intermittent low-dose interferon-α2b, with or without dacarbazine preconditioning (https://www.

Strain-Dependent Morphology of Reactive Astrocytes in Human- and Animal-Vole-Adapted Prions.

Reactive astrogliosis is one of the pathological hallmarks of prion diseases. Recent studies highlighted the influence of several factors on the astrocyte phenotype in prion diseases, including the brain region involved, the genotype backgrounds of the host, and the prion strain. Elucidating the influence of prion strains on the astrocyte phenotype may provide crucial insights for developing therapeutic strategies.

An optimized Western blot assay provides a comprehensive assessment of the physiological endoproteolytic processing of the prion protein.

The prion protein (PrP) is subjected to several conserved endoproteolytic events producing bioactive fragments that are of increasing interest for their physiological functions and their implication in the pathogenesis of prion diseases and other neurodegenerative diseases. However, systematic and comprehensive investigations on the full spectrum of PrP proteoforms have been hampered by the lack of methods able to identify all PrP-derived proteoforms. Building on previous knowledge of PrP endoproteolytic processing, we thus developed an optimized Western blot assay able to obtain the maximum information about PrP constitutive processing and the relative abundance of PrP proteoforms in a complex biological sample.

Corrigendum to "Multicentre Harmonisation of a Six-Colour Flow Cytometry Panel for Naïve/Memory T Cell Immunomonitoring".

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1155/2020/1938704.].

Multicentre Harmonisation of a Six-Colour Flow Cytometry Panel for Naïve/Memory T Cell Immunomonitoring.

Background: Personalised medicine in oncology needs standardised immunological assays. Flow cytometry (FCM) methods represent an essential tool for immunomonitoring, and their harmonisation is crucial to obtain comparable data in multicentre clinical trials. The objective of this study was to design a harmonisation workflow able to address the most effective issues contributing to intra- and interoperator variabilities in a multicentre project.