Loading
Life sciences · Journal article
Science Advances · October 28, 2026
No summary has been generated for this record yet. What follows is drawn from its source metadata only.
Journal article.
No findings were extractable from the material analysed.
Safety was not reported in the material analysed. Check the source before drawing any conclusion about harm.
The source did not state who this applies to in practice.
Graded across the dimensions that decide whether you should act, each from what the source actually supports. There is no single score, and where a dimension was not assessed it says so.
This record has not been graded across any dimension yet. Treat the label above as provisional and read the source.
What is missing. This record has no bottom line, key findings, reported figures, evidence dimensions. That is a gap in the analysis, not a judgement about the study.
Intratumoral microbial antigens, which mimic tumor antigens, can be presented by human leukocyte antigen (HLA) molecules, thereby eliciting antitumor immune responses. However, a comprehensive pan-cancer characterization of such molecularly mimicking microbial epitopes is still lacking. Here, we construct a pan-cancer microbial epitope landscape from 1190 samples across 24 cancer types. Pan-cancer analyses reveal that microbial epitopes exhibit higher hydrophobicity, aliphatic indices, and stability than human epitopes. Nine HLA-I alleles tend to bind microbial epitopes, and HLA-C alleles show a stronger tendency to present microbial epitopes than HLA-A and HLA-B alleles. Moreover, we reveal that microbial species capable of generating HLA-I epitopes are more prevalent in tumors, that broadly detected epitopes span more cancer types, and that multiple microbial genera generate numerous immunogenic epitopes. Notably, homologous microbial epitopes and tumor antigens elicit cross-reactive T cell responses, and experimental evidence demonstrates that microbial epitopes exhibit enhanced immunogenicity and antitumor efficacy. Overall, our findings provide a foundation for microbial epitope vaccine development, offering insights for cancer prevention and therapy.