Alina Steinbach

← Zurück zu Team - Ehemalige Labormitglieder

HPV-induced changes in antigen processing and MHC-I epitope presentation

The clearance of HPV infection requires an effective T cell mediated immune response. Therefore, several approaches to develop a therapeutic vaccine have focused on HPV-derived T cell epitopes. However, these approaches so far had limited clinical success. This is caused by the fact that HPV employs numerous immune evasion mechanisms, among which MHC-I downregulation and repression of components of the antigen-processing machinery (APM) directly interfere with T cell recognition of infected or already transformed host cells. 

The goal of this project was to analyze the expression of APM components systematically in a large collection of cell lines naturally transformed by HPV16. In addition, the impact of the inflammatory cytokine IFN-γ, which is enhancing antigen processing and presentation, was examined. The only consistent change of an APM component was upregulation of the ER-associated aminopeptidase ERAP1. Its upregulation reduced surface presentation of some HPV epitopes, and may thus represent a novel HPV immune evasion mechanism.