PDL1-targeted vaccine exhibits potent antitumor activity by simultaneously blocking PD1/PDL1 pathway and activating PDL1-specific immune responses.

Despite the clinical success of immune checkpoint blockade, only a subset of people exhibits durable responses, suggesting that an alternative immunotherapeutic strategy is required. This paper reported a two-in-one cancer vaccine that targets programmed death ligand 1 (PDL1) that blocks the PD1/PDL1 pathway and also activates antitumor immune response. The PDL1- NitraTh vaccine, which consists of the extracellular domain of PDL1 and nitrated T cell epitope, effectively broke the immune tolerance of PDL1 and elicited PDL1-specific humoral and cellular immunity.

Efficient Acquisition of Fully Human Antibody Genes against Self-Proteins by Sorting Single B Cells Stimulated with Vaccines Based on Nitrated T Helper Cell Epitopes.

Single B cell antibody technology is a method for isolating antigen-specific B cells from human peripheral blood and obtaining antibody genes in developing antibody drugs. However, owing to immune tolerance to autoantigen, human autoantigen-specific B cells are difficult to acquire by conventional single B cell technology. In this study, we constructed a nitrated T-cell epitope named NitraTh by incorporating -nitrophenylalanine into a universal T helper epitope.