Synaptonemal Complex Protein 1 (SCP1) is a novel tumor antigen that belongs to the growing family of cancer/testis antigens (CTAs). CTAs are theoretically ideal targets for tumor immunotherapy. Unlike most auto-antigens, CTAs are highly immunogenic, even in the autologous cancer-bearing patients. Furthermore, because of their very restricted normal tissue expression, immunotherapy targeting CTAs is expected to be more specific and less toxic. These two theoretical properties of CTAs have arisen from the belief that, because they are testicular-specific, they are normally only expressed in the immune privileged testicles where there is an apparent lack of human leukocyte antigen (HLA) class I molecules on the surface of germ cells (1).
SCP1 has been shown to be expressed during the meiotic prophase of spermatocytes and is involved in the pairing of homologous chromosomes during meiosis. The aberrant expression of SCP1 in tumors might be a contributing factor to their genomic instability and suggests that the functional role of other CTAs (2). Expression of SCP1 in epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) by IHC in paraffin-fixed EOC human samples and ELISA using anti-SCP1 antibodies revealed that 15 % of the primary tumors had elevated levels of SCP1, while SCP1 mRNA was found to be 14.3% (4/28) in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (3, 4). These observations suggest that SCP1 might be a new tumor target antigen of carcinomas. Further research on the exact role of SCP1 CTAs is warranted and is an open area of research.
Novus Biologicals offers various SCP1 reagents for your products research needs including:
