Research paper In vitro methods for generating CD8 + T-cell clones for immunotherapy from the naïve repertoire

Innovations in gene discovery and the analysis of gene expression are facilitating the identification of a growing number of antigens that could potentially be targeted for immunotherapy of tumors. Methods to reliably generate antigen-specific T-cell responses in vitro would be useful not only to screen candidate antigens for immunogenicity prior to embarking on in vivo vaccination trials, but also to generate T-cell lines or clones that could be used directly for adoptive immunotherapy approaches. Although many techniques have proven successful for expanding ex vivo effector cells from antigen-specific memory CD8 + cells that have been primed in vivo, methods to reliably generate high-avidity CTL clones from the naive repertoire have not been well described. Various methods for the induction and expansion of antigen-specific CD8 + CTL clones from healthy A2 + donors were