Immunotherapy Targeting For Hepato-Cellular Carcinoma With DNA Vaccine Of Legumain Gene In Mice

Objective : The death and recurrence rates of hepato- cellular carcinoma (HCC) is rather high as its high mutation rate,immunity escaption,weak antigenicity and abundant blood supplement. None of available therapies has significantly improved the dismal prognosis of patients with unresectable HCC. DNA vaccine application in prophylaxis and therapies has made a big progress and some of them is being on trial.The rationale for selecting legumain as a target for our DNA-based vaccines is based on the following characteristics; Initially, positional gene expression profiling of tumor tissue facilitated a search for genes that are up-regulated in tumors and their vasculature, identifying legumain as being highly expressed in many murine and human tumor tissues. In contrast, legumain expression was very low or absent in all normal tissues from tumor; legumain is also over-expressed by endothelial cells in the tumor vasculature and by TAMs in the tumor microenvironment. In our study, we first surveyed the expression of legumain in HepG2 cell and human HCC tissues. Second, We generated a set of expression vectors for constructing legumain DNA vaccines, based on the PCMV/cyto vector backbone, the...