Fig. 1.

Five candidate GPC3 epitopes were validated as real-world T cell epitopes by IFN-γ Elispot assay using patients’ PBMCs. PBMCs from HLA-A0201⁺/GPC3⁺ HCC patients were co-cultured for 20 h with the peptide pools of 25 candidate epitopes in the first-round Elispot assays and with single candidate epitope peptide in the second-round Elispot assays. a Representative SFUs plots of 5 validated epitope peptides in the second-round Elispot assays. b The scatter grams of SFUs numbers for each validated epitope peptide and its negative control well (no peptide) in the patients’ PBMCs which displayed positive T cell responses in the second-round Elispot assays