The best studied costimulatory pathway is represented by the CD28/CTLA4-B7 system (2, 3) where B7-1 (CD80) and B7-2 (CD86) bind either to an activating (CD28) or to an inhibitory (CTLA4) receptor on T cells (4). A variety of studies demonstrate the significance of CD28 costimulation in the clonal expansion of naïve T cells, the regulation of long term survival of T cells, induction of cell cycle progression, and cytokine secretion (5). The elucidation of the CD28-mediated functions has facilitated the development of therapeutic strategies, particularly vaccination studies, that target this pathway. Most efforts to induce antigen-specific immunity by application of cancer vaccines have focused on the generation of tumor-reactive CD8 ϩ cytotoxic T cells (CTLs) (6). Whereas B7-negative tumor cells most often fail to induce an efficient immune response, B7-1 and/or B7-2 expression on tumor cells augments the anti-tumor response by inducing T cell proliferation, cytokine secretion, and an enhanced generation of tumor-specific CD8 ϩ CTLs (7-10). B7-transduced renal cell carcinoma cells are an example of the strategy to stimulate tumor-infiltrating T cells to promote an efficient antitumor response (11,12).The efficacy of an antitumor reaction is usually monitored by in vitro determination of the number of antigen-specific T cells that secrete cytokines in response to antigen challenge. The monitoring can be achieved by enzyme-linked immunospot techniques (13,14), flow cytometry (15), multiplex-based immunoassays (16) or . Such assays, however, do not provide any information regarding the various signaling and metabolic pathways activated upon CD28 costimulation of the T cell. Particularly only limited information on the genetic expression programs linked to CD28 costimulation exists (18 -20), whereas to our best knowledge no study to date has assessed the protein expression patterns of both prestimulated and naïve T cells upon CD28 costimulation. To address the complexity of the T cell response directed against a defined, B7-transduced tumor cell vaccine, here we applied proteome-based technologies and identified a variety of differentially expressed proteins in T cells following B7-1 and