A novel rapid modularized hepatitis B core virus-like particle-based platform for personalized cancer vaccine preparation via fixed-point coupling

Abstract

Personalized cancer vaccine which targets neoepitopes shows great promise for cancer treatment. However, rapid preparation is a critical challenge for clinical application of personalized cancer vaccine. Genetic recombination and chemical modification are a time-consuming “trial and error” pattern for making vaccines. Here we first constructed a platform for peptide vaccine preparation by inserting SpyCatcher into the major immunodominant region (MIR) of hepatitis B core protein (HBc) (1-183). The resulted recombinant protein HBc(1-183)-SpyCatcher (HBc(1-183)-S) assembled to virus-like particles (VLPs) and readily bound to SpyTag conjugated with OVA epitope peptides by just mixing, forming HBc(1-183)-S-OVA. HBc(1-183)-S-OVA VLPs effectively induced dendritic cell maturation. Our further results indicated that HBc(1-183)-S-OVA VLPs vaccination inhibited tumor growth in both prophylactic and treatment ways in E.G7-OVA tumor bearing mice by generating significant OVA-specific cytotoxic T lymphocyte responses. Our study provides a simple, rapid, efficient and universal HBc-based platform for the preparation of personalized cancer vaccine.