Cancer immunotherapy works by stimulating and strengthening the body’s anti-tumor immune response to eliminate cancer cells. Over the past few decades, immunotherapy has shown remarkable efficacy in the treatment of cancer, particularly the success of immune checkpoint blockade targeting CTLA-4, PD-1 and PDL1, which has led to a breakthrough in tumor immunotherapy. Tumor neoantigens, a new approach to tumor immunotherapy, include antigens produced by tumor viruses integrated into the genome and antigens produced by mutant proteins, which are abundantly expressed only in tumor cells and have strong immunogenicity and tumor heterogeneity. A growing number of studies have highlighted the relationship between neoantigens and T cells’ recognition of cancer cells. Vaccines developed against neoantigens are now being used in clinical trials in various solid tumors. In this review, we summarized the latest advances in the classification of immunotherapy and the process of classification, identification and synthesis of tumor-specific neoantigens, as well as their role in current cancer immunotherapy. Finally, the application prospects and existing problems of neoantigens were discussed.

Background Glioma is a common malignant brain tumor. The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of the transcription factor SPI1 in glioma. Methods SPI1 expression in glioma was identified using qRT-PCR and Western blotting. Cell proliferation was assessed using the CCK8 assay. Transwell and wound healing assays were utilized to evaluate cell migration. Additionally, cell cycle and apoptosis were detected using flow cytometry. Results We observed that the expression level of SPI1 was up-regulated in glioma tissues, compared to normal tissues. Furthermore, we found that SPI1 is able to promote proliferation and migration of glioma cells in vitro. Flow cytometry results demonstrate that, compared to si-NC cells, si-SPI1 cells stagnated in the G1 phase, and down-regulation of SPI1 expression is able to increase rates of apoptosis. Double luciferase activity and chromatin immunoprecipitation assay results indicated that SPI1 can bind to the promoter sites and promote the proliferation and migration of glioma cells by regulating the expression of oncogenic PAICS. Conclusions Our results suggest that SPI1 can promote proliferation and migration of glioma. Furthermore, SPI1 can be utilized as a potential diagnostic marker and therapeutic target for glioma.

Tumor-infiltrating immune cells are associated with prognosis and immunotherapy targets in colorectal cancer (CRC). The recently developed CIBERSORT method allows immune cell analysis by deconvolution of high-throughput data onto gene expression. In this study, we analyzed the relative proportions of immune cells in GEO (94 samples) and TCGA (522 samples) CRC data based on the CIBERSORT method. A total of 22 types of tumor-infiltrating immune cells were evaluated. Combined with GEO and TCGA data, it was found that naive B cells, M2 macrophages, and resting mast cells were highly expressed in normal tissues, while M0 macrophages, M1 macrophages, activated mast cells, and neutrophils were highly expressed in tumors. Moreover, we constructed a prognostic model by infiltrating immune cells that showed high specificity and sensitivity in both the training (AUC of 5-year survival = 0.699) and validation (AUC of 5-year survival = 0.844) sets. This provides another basis for clinical prognosis. The results of multiple immunofluorescence detection showed that there were differences in the results of bioinformatics analysis. Neutrophils were highly expressed in normal tissues, and M2 macrophages were highly expressed in tumor tissues. Collectively, our data suggested that infiltrating immune cells in CRC may be an important determinant of prognosis and immunotherapy.