Samples From Leukemia Patients and Their Donors to Identify Specific Antigens

It is well known that tumor cells and leukemia cells express different surface structures (called antigens) that can serve as targets for cancer cell destruction by the immune system. Effective immune therapies are characterized by high specificity and low toxicity. One of the major obstacles impeding the use of these therapies as standard of care is the identification of good target antigens. In acute myeloid leukemia (AML) there is major patient to patient variation in leukemia antigens, so there is no universal AML cell target. Rather, each patient has a unique array of potential cell targets. Thanks to the rapid progress of new DNA/RNA sequencing technologies, the identification of these unique, patient-specific leukemia cell antigen-targets is now possible.

The purpose of this project is to develop a process to identify highly personalized antigens that are uniquely expressed by the patient's own leukemia cells that can be used for cellular immune therapy.