Fig. 3.

Tax-targeted immunotherapy for ATL patients. a The Tax-specific CTL response is mostly impaired in ATL patients but often activated after HSCT and can be evaluated by proliferation of CD8+ Tax-specific CTLs upon stimulation with autologous HTLV-1-infected cells (left). The amino acid sequences of the major epitopes recognized by these Tax-specific CTLs were identified (right) [116, 120]. b An anti-ATL therapeutic vaccine (Tax-DC) was developed using autologous DCs pulsed with Tax peptides corresponding to the major epitopes recognized by CTLs (left). Proliferative response of CD8+ Tax-specific CTLs upon stimulation with cognate Tax peptides before and 20 weeks after Tax-DC vaccination in Patient 1 (right), and the clinical outcomes of all three patients in the pilot clinical study (bottom) are shown [28, 119]