Nucleic Acids Research Advance Access originally published online on October 5, 2008
Nucleic Acids Research 2009 37(Database issue):D816-D819; doi:10.1093/nar/gkn673
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Nucleic Acids Research, 2009, Vol. 37, Database issue D816-D819
© 2008 The Author(s)
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This article appears in the following Nucleic Acids Research issue: Database issue [View the issue table of contents]
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CTdatabase: a knowledge-base of high-throughput and curated data on cancer-testis antigens
1Laboratório Nacional de Computação Científica, Petrópolis, RJ, Brazil, 2Human Genetics Department, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, 3Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, New York, NY, USA, 4Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) and Structural Biology and Bioinformatics Department, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland and 5Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, São Paulo, SP, Brazil
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +55 24 22336065; Fax: +55 24 33 6124; Email: atrv{at}lncc.br
Received August 14, 2008. Revised September 21, 2008. Accepted September 22, 2008.
The potency of the immune response has still to be harnessed effectively to combat human cancers. However, the discovery of T-cell targets in melanomas and other tumors has raised the possibility that cancer vaccines can be used to induce a therapeutically effective immune response against cancer. The targets, cancer-testis (CT) antigens, are immunogenic proteins preferentially expressed in normal gametogenic tissues and different histological types of tumors. Therapeutic cancer vaccines directed against CT antigens are currently in late-stage clinical trials testing whether they can delay or prevent recurrence of lung cancer and melanoma following surgical removal of primary tumors. CT antigens constitute a large, but ill-defined, family of proteins that exhibit a remarkably restricted expression. Currently, there is a considerable amount of information about these proteins, but the data are scattered through the literature and in several bioinformatic databases. The database presented here, CTdatabase (http://www.cta.lncc.br), unifies this knowledge to facilitate both the mining of the existing deluge of data, and the identification of proteins alleged to be CT antigens, but that do not have their characteristic restricted expression pattern. CTdatabase is more than a repository of CT antigen data, since all the available information was carefully curated and annotated with most data being specifically processed for CT antigens and stored locally. Starting from a compilation of known CT antigens, CTdatabase provides basic information including gene names and aliases, RefSeq accession numbers, genomic location, known splicing variants, gene duplications and additional family members. Gene expression at the mRNA level in normal and tumor tissues has been collated from publicly available data obtained by several different technologies. Manually curated data related to mRNA and protein expression, and antigen-specific immune responses in cancer patients are also available, together with links to PubMed for relevant CT antigen articles.
The authors wish it to be known that, in their opinion, the first two authors should be regarded as joint First Authors.
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