Many of today’s vaccines, either protein or virus-based, require intracellular processing and presentation via HLA for their activity. However, the requirement for several sequential biological processes (such as protein endocytosis or viral infection, protein cleavage, peptide loading of nascent HLA proteins) and their subsequent presentation on the cell surface results in a great deal of uncertainty as to the amount of antigen being actively presented to the immune system. This has consequences for both programme risk going into the clinic and for demonstrating batch-to-batch consistency of the vaccine.

Immunocore’s high affinity mTCRs, however, make it possible for the first time to quantify accurately the amount of peptide epitope being presented at the surface of the cell after processing. Immunocore has developed a number of robust and reproducible assays and techniques which can: • confirm the active presentation of the desired epitope, thus reducing risk before initiating clinical trials, • allow comparison of vaccine formulations to ensure the highest possible epitope presentation • allow monitoring of subsequent batch-to-batch variations.

Immunocore currently has a collaboration on vaccine validation with Sanofi Pasteur. Please contact us if you would like to discuss the application of mTCRs for your vaccine programme.

• Purbhoo et al., (2006). Quantifying and Imaging NY-ESO-1/LAGE-1-Derived Epitopes on Tumor Cells Using High Affinity T Cell Receptors. J. Immunol. 176 pp.7308-7316