Curatopes Melanoma

Curatopes Melanoma predicts and ranks nonmutated T-cell peptide epitopes for therapeutic vaccination in metastatic cutaneous melanoma to prioritize candidates with high expected efficacy and low autoimmunity risk.

Key Features:

• Predicted nonmutated peptide epitopes: The database lists nonmutated T-cell peptide epitopes derived from genes overexpressed in melanoma biopsies relative to healthy tissues.
• Self-tolerance and reduced autoimmunity: Candidate epitopes are filtered against expression profiles in survival-critical tissues to prioritize epitopes with lower risk of inducing severe autoimmunity.
• Aggregated therapeutic-efficiency score: Each epitope is assigned an aggregated score estimating expected therapeutic efficiency to facilitate shortlisting of candidates.
• Curated antitumor epitope set for trial design: The collection provides a curated set of antitumor T-cell epitopes intended to support epitope selection and clinical trial design.

Scientific Applications:

• Vaccine development for metastatic cutaneous melanoma: Prioritizing nonmutated epitopes to support design of T-cell–based therapeutic vaccines.
• Preclinical and clinical candidate selection and safety assessment: Shortlisting epitopes for experimental studies and clinical trials with emphasis on tolerability relative to survival-critical tissues.

Methodology:

Predicting and scoring T-cell epitopes using gene expression data from melanoma biopsies, filtering predictions against a curated list of survival-critical tissues, and computing an aggregated therapeutic-efficiency score for each epitope.