Institut National De La Sante Et De La Recherche Medicale

Université De Nantes

Catherine Rabu

François Lang

The present invention relates to the prevention and treatment of disease like cancer. The inventors have previously characterized MELOE-1 antigen as an IRES dependent, melanoma specific translation product from a lncRNA mainly transcribed in the melanocytic lineage. MELOE-1 contains numerous class II epitopes and one HLA-A*0201-restricted CD8 epitope eliciting a frequent repertoire of high avidity T cells. They designed various synthetic long peptide (SLPs) comprising a CD4 epitope coupled to the CD8 epitope by a serie of linkers of 4 to 6 aa and studied the efficacy of T cell clone activation by SLP-loaded DC in vitro. Particularly, they evaluated the ability of a few selected SLPs to stimulate specific T cells proliferation of PBL from healthy donors in vitro and finally, they explored the vaccination potential of their best SLP candidate in vivo in an HLA*A0201/HLA-DRB0101 transgenic mouse. Thus, the present invention relates a SLP comprising a CD4 class II peptide linked to a CD8 class I peptide by a specific linker and its use in the treatment of disease like cancers.

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Nantes, France

Catherine Rabu