After transplantation of haploidentical hematopoietic stem cells and infusion of donor T cells, leukemic cells can escape from the donor's antileukemic T cells through the loss of the mismatched HLA haplotype. This event leads to relapse.

and *4501, but not other alleles. Based on these findings, we developed an algorithm for prediction of nonpermissive HLA-DPB1 mismatches. Retrospective evaluation of 118 transplantations showed that the presence of nonpermissive HLA-DPB1 mismatches was correlated with significantly increased hazards of acute grade II to IV graftversus-host disease (HR ‫؍‬ 1.87, P ‫؍‬ .046) and transplantation-related mortality (HR ‫؍‬ 2.69, P ‫؍‬ .027) but not relapse (HR ‫؍‬ 0.98, P ‫؍‬ .939), as compared with the permissive group. There was also a marked but statistically not significant increase in the hazards of overall mortality (HR ‫؍‬ 1.64, P ‫؍‬ .1). These data suggest that biologic characterization of in vivo alloreactivity can be a tool for definition of clinically relevant nonpermissive HLA mismatches for unrelated HSC transplantation.

C psittaci-eradicating antibiotic therapy with doxycycline is followed by objective response in patients with ocular adnexal lymphoma, even after multiple relapses of the disease. A confirmatory, large, phase II trial is warranted to confirm whether this fast, cheap, and well-tolerated therapy could replace other more aggressive strategies as first-line treatment against ocular adnexal lymphomas.

In this study we used TEPITOPE, a new epitope prediction software, to identify sequence segments on the MAGE-3 protein with promiscuous binding to histocompatibility leukocyte antigen (HLA)-DR molecules. Synthetic peptides corresponding to the identified sequences were synthesized and used to propagate CD4+ T cells from the blood of a healthy donor. CD4+ T cells strongly recognized MAGE-3281–295 and, to a lesser extent, MAGE-3141–155 and MAGE-3146–160. Moreover, CD4+ T cells proliferated in the presence of recombinant MAGE-3 after processing and presentation by autologous antigen presenting cells, demonstrating that the MAGE-3 epitopes recognized are naturally processed. CD4+ T cells, mostly of the T helper 1 type, showed specific lytic activity against HLA-DR11/MAGE-3–positive melanoma cells. Cold target inhibition experiments demonstrated indeed that the CD4+ T cells recognized MAGE-3281–295 in association with HLA-DR11 on melanoma cells. This is the first evidence that a tumor-specific shared antigen forms CD4+ T cell epitopes. Furthermore, we validated the use of algorithms for the prediction of promiscuous CD4+ T cell epitopes, thus opening the possibility of wide application to other tumor-associated antigens. These results have direct implications for cancer immunotherapy in the design of peptide-based vaccines with tumor-specific CD4+ T cell epitopes.