PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Xia Li
AU  - Hailiang Huang
AU  - Yanfang Guang
AU  - Yuhua Gong
AU  - Chen-Yi He
AU  - Xin Yi
AU  - Ming Qi
AU  - Zhi-Ying Chen
TI  - The Cancer Epitope Trees of 23 Early Cervical Cancers in Chinese Women
AID  - 10.1101/043927
DP  - 2016 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 043927
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/03/16/043927.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/03/16/043927.full
AB  - Emerging evidences suggest the heterogeneity of cancers limits the efficacy of immunotherapy. To search for optimal therapeutic targets, we used whole-exome sequencing data from 23 early cervical tumors from Chinese women to investigate the hierarchical structure of the somatic mutations and the predicted neo-epitopes based on their strong binding with major histocompatibility complex class I molecules. We found each tumor carried 117 mutations and 61 neo-epitopes in average and displayed a unique phylogenic tree and “cancer neo-epitope tree” comprising different compositions of mutations or neo-epitopes. Conceivably, the neo-epitopes at the top of the tree shared by all cancer cells are the optimal therapeutic targets that might lead to a cure. Human papillomavirus can be used as therapeutic target in only a proportion of cases where the integrated genome exits without active infection. Therefore, the “cancer neo-epitope tree” will serve as an important source to determine of the optimal immunotherapeutic target.