There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
The immune response can effectively hamper the progression of preclinical stages of
tumor growth. Medicine in the postgenomic era offers an increasing possibility of
detecting healthy individuals at risk of developing cancer who could benefit from
tumor-preventive vaccines. The identification of novel tumor antigens that fulfill
two conditions will be crucial for the development of cancer immunoprevention. First,
an ideal antigen should have a crucial pathogenetic role in tumor growth to avoid
the selection of antigen-loss variants. Second, the antigen should be recognizable
by the immune system even in MHC-loss variants and should therefore be recognized
both by antibodies and T cells. Identifying such antigens will also provide new targets
for cancer immunotherapy.