Immunopeptidomics in the cancer immunotherapy era

Abstract

Cancer is the primary cause of death worldwide, and conventional treatments are painful, complicated, and have negative effects on healthy cells. However, cancer immunotherapy has emerged as a promising alternative. Principle of cancer immunotherapy is the re-activation of T-cell to combat the tumor that presents the peptide antigen on major histocompatibility complex (MHC). Those peptide antigens are identified with the set of omics technology, proteomics, genomics, and bioinformatics, which referred to immunopeptidomics. Indeed, immunopeptidomics can identify the neoantigens that are very useful for cancer immunotherapies. This review explored the use of immunopeptidomics for various immunotherapies, i.e., peptide-based vaccines, immune checkpoint inhibitors, oncolytic viruses, and chimeric antigen receptor T-cell. We also discussed how the diversity of neoantigens allows for the discovery of novel antigenic peptides while posttranslationally modified peptides diversify the overall peptides binding to MHC or so-called MHC ligandome. The development of immunopeptidomics is keeping up-to-date and very active, particularly for clinical application. Immunopeptidomics is expected to be fast, accurate and reliable for the application for cancer immunotherapies. © The Author(s) 2024.