T cell-mediated cell immunity is the main anti-tumor immunity in which the effector T cells need specific antigen and costimulatory signals. One of the vaccines applied in tumor immunotherapy is the gene-modified tumor cell vaccine. One potential method to increase cell epitope density is to link the antigen with the major histcompatibility complex subunit β2m. Our previous research indicated that the strategy of epitope fusion gene OVA-linker-β2m can promote the formation of specific compounds on the tumor cell surface in vitro. In this study, we constructed two coexpression vectors pGL3-CD80-OVA-linker-β2m and pGL3-IL21-OVA-linker-β2m, in order to explore the cooperative action of CD80 or interleukin-21 (IL21) with the epitope fusion gene in anti-tumor immunity. Results showed that gene-modified B16 cells (B16/OVA, B16/CD80-OVA and B16/IL21-OVA) grew slower than B16 cells in vitro and in vivo, especially the B16/IL21-OVA subline, which illustrated that such gene modification decreased oncogenicity of malignant tumor cells. On the other hand, gene-modified tumor cell subline immunization can induce effective long-term anti-tumor immunity defending tumor cell attacks. IL21 played a more cooperative role with the OVA-linker-β2m than CD80 in this study. This strategy might lay foundations for the research of a new type of tumor vaccine.

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