Cookie Settings

We use cookies to optimize our website. These include cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site, as well as those that are only used for anonymous statistic. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Further information can be found in our data privacy protection .

Essential

These cookies are necessary to run the core functionalities of this website and cannot be disabled.

Name Webedition CMS
Purpose This cookie is required by the CMS (Content Management System) Webedition for the system to function correctly. Typically, this cookie is deleted when the browser is closed.
Name econda
Purpose Session cookie emos_jcsid for the web analysis software econda. This runs in the “anonymized measurement” mode. There is no personal reference. As soon as the user leaves the site, tracking is ended and all data in the browser are automatically deleted.
Statistics

These cookies help us understand how visitors interact with our website by collecting and analyzing information anonymously. Depending on the tool, one or more cookies are set by the provider.

Name econda
Purpose Statistics
External media

Content from external media platforms is blocked by default. If cookies from external media are accepted, access to this content no longer requires manual consent.

Name YouTube
Purpose Show YouTube content
Name Twitter
Purpose activate Twitter Feeds
Immunotherapy and Immunoprevention

Division of Immunotherapy and Immunoprevention

PD Dr. Dr. Angelika Riemer

At least 20% of human malignancies are caused by consequences of persistent infections. Cancers caused by infectious agents (e.g. human papillomavirus – HPV) are attractive targets for cancer vaccination approaches, as they provide the opportunity to target antigens that are immunological non-self. Vaccination can be prophylactic, inducing antibodies that prevent infection, or therapeutic, stimulating the cellular immune system into eradicating established disease. Prophylactic immunization against HPV has become the paradigm for cancer immunoprevention. Unfortunately, current HPV vaccines have no therapeutic effect on existing infections.
The aim of therapeutic vaccination is to stimulate the immune system into recognizing and destroying malignant cells. Cytotoxic T cells (CTL) kill infected cells after recognizing bits of viral proteins, so-called epitopes, which are presented on human leukocyte antigen (HLA) molecules on the cell surface. There are thousands of different HLA types, all presenting different epitopes. As every human being has a different set of HLA molecules, epitopes for all major HLA groups need to be defined for therapeutic vaccine development.
The overall aim of this group is to generate a therapeutic cancer vaccine against HPV-induced malignancies that is applicable to everyone regardless of a person’s HLA type. We are currently working on the precise identification which HPV epitopes are presented on tumor cells by a mass spectrometry (MS) approach. This is important as HPV employs various immune evasion mechanisms, and not every possible viral epitope will be presented on the tumor cell surface. Identified epitopes are tested for immunogenicity; we examine various vaccine delivery and adjuvant formulations. Moreover, we are developing tumor models that allow assessing the efficiency of our vaccines.

FUTURE OUTLOOK:
Future aims are to use the established tumor models to investigate ways of improving the trafficking of vaccination-induced T cells to the tumor site. As our approach of epitope identification is highly sensitive, we are also applying it to a current area of immunotherapy research: the identification of tumor-mutation-derived neoepitopes. These epitopes offer the chance of specifically attacking tumor cells, without harming healthy tissues. All these studies contribute to an optimal formulation of therapeutic vaccines, aiming at the effective induction of adaptive immune responses in cancer patients, or to target identification for adoptive T cell therapies.

Contact

PD Dr. Dr. Angelika Riemer
Immunotherapy and Immunoprevention (D410)
Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum
Im Neuenheimer Feld 280
69120 Heidelberg
Tel: +49 6221 42 3820

Selected Publications

  • Zottnick, S., Voß, A.L., Riemer A.B. (2020) Inducing immunity where it matters: orthotopic HPV tumor models and therapeutic vaccinations. Frontiers in Immunology, 11:1750. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2020.01750.
  • Bonsack, M.*, Hoppe, S.*, Winter, J., Tichy, D., Zeller, C., Küpper, M.D., Schitter, E.C., Blatnik, R., Riemer, A.B. (2019) Performance Evaluation of MHC Class-I Binding Prediction Tools Based on an Experimentally Validated MHC-Peptide Binding Data Set. Cancer Immunology Research, 7(5):719-736. doi: 10.1158/2326-6066.CIR-18-0584. * Equal contributors.
  • Kruse, S., Büchler, M., Uhl, P., Sauter, M., Scherer, P., Lan, T.C.T., Zottnick, S., Klevenz, A., Yang, R., Rösl, F., Mier, W., Riemer, A.B. (2018) Therapeutic vaccination using minimal HPV16 epitopes in a novel MHC-humanized murine HPV tumor model. OncoImmunology, 8(1):e1524694. doi: 10.1080/2162402X.2018.1524694.
  • Blatnik, R.*, Mohan, N.*, Bonsack, M.*, Falkenby, L.G., Hoppe, S., Josef, K., Steinbach, A., Becker, S., Nadler, W.M., Rucevic, M., Larsen, M.R., Salek, M., Riemer, A.B. (2018) A targeted LC-MS strategy for low-abundant HLA class I-presented peptide detection identifies novel human papillomavirus T-cell epitopes. Proteomics, 18(11):e1700390. doi: 10.1002/pmic.201700390. * Equal contributors.
to top
powered by webEdition CMS