Users can narrow down their query to only include epitopes tested in a specific clinical and/or immunological context using the ‘Cancer’ panel (Figure 1).
Figure 1. The Cancer panel on the CEDAR homepage
A cancer type can be selected by typing it into the text box, where matching cancer types appear in the drop-down menu. Alternatively, users can search for cancer types and related diseases in the ‘Disease Finder’, which can be accessed using the finder icon next to the text box. Here, users can search for different cancer types by name or using the Disease Ontology (DOID) (34755882.pdf (1.5 MB)) or the Ontology of Immune Epitopes (ONTIE)(22681406.pdf (596.8 KB)) identifiers, and also explore the ‘Disease Tree’ to select cancer types of interest.
In the ‘Cancer’ panel, users can also select a cancer stage they want to query from the drop-down menu. The cancers can further be narrowed down according to how the host was exposed, i.e., ‘Naturally occurring disease’ (e.g., occurrence of breast cancer), ‘Animal model of cancer’ (e.g., C57BL/6 or BALB/c), and ‘Vaccination’ (e.g., therapeutic vaccination with neoantigens or prophylactic vaccination against human papillomavirus (HPV)). In the example query in Figure 1, the ‘Type’ field was left blank to include all cancer types, and ‘Naturally occurring disease’ was selected to only include immune responses that occurred naturally without any intervention.