The aim of cancer immunotherapy is to induce a sustained immune response against the tumor while leaving the normal host cells intact. One of the immunological approaches to cancer treatment is in situ vaccination. In this approach, the amount and visibility of tumor antigens (TA) is increased by therapies known to induce immunogenic cell death. This in turn can lead to the development of a specific immune response against released TAs. For in situ vaccination, pore-forming toxins that cause cell lysis are particularly attractive because they can release TA. Cytolysin A (ClyA) also belongs to this group of toxins. To investigate the use of ClyA for cancer treatment by in situ vaccination, two clyA-encoding plasmids were constructed, pORF-ClyAhsp and pORF-ClyAhsp-Xmark. The latter was used to produce the plasmid pORF-ClyAhsp-ORT without the antibiotic resistance gene to ensure safety according to regulatory agency standards. Stable maintenance of the constructed plasmids in Escherichia coli bacterial strains JM109 and DH1-ORT was confirmed. In addition, we were interested in whether the constructed pORF-ClyAhsp-ORT is functional and ClyA is expressed in eukaryotic cells after transfection, and we compared the obtained results with the transfection of the B16-F10 cell line with the pEGFP-N1 plasmid. Based on the results obtained, it would be reasonable to carry out further studies in the future to assay whether the ClyA produced based on the cloned gene in the plasmids is cytotoxic and thus useful for the treatment of cancer by in situ vaccination.
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