Database Overview
The Cancer Epitope Database and Analysis Resource (CEDAR) is a freely available resource funded by NCI. It catalogs experimental data on antibody and T cell peptidic epitopes primarily studied in humans and non-human primates in the context of cancer disease. CEDAR also hosts tools to assist in the prediction and analysis of cancer epitopes. CEDAR was initiated in 2021 and is a companion site to the Immune Epitope Database (IEDB), which is funded by NIAID, and houses epitope data on infectious disease, allergy, autoimmunity and transplantation.
The process of retrieving literature for CEDAR is the same as the process for retrieving literature for the IEDB, i.e. a biweekly query of PubMed and the PDB. However, cancer related keywords have been added to the query in order to identify cancer literature. More information regarding the literature curation process can be found in the Getting Started With the IEDB article. Since 2021, CEDAR has extracted antibody, T cell, and major histocompatibility complex (MHC) experimental data from >5,000 publications, amounting to 4.4 million assays and 1.3 million epitopes. As of March 2025, the CEDAR curation team has processed over 96% percent of all relevant cancer epitope literature published since 2014.
Querying CEDAR
The CEDAR query interface was developed by collaborating with experts in cancer immunology, with the goal of making the most requested information easily accessible. Much like the IEDB, the CEDAR query interface includes multiple panels to refine searches, with the Epitope, Assay, Host, and MHC Restriction panels being essentially the same. The Epitope Source and Cancer panels are more cancer specific, allowing the user to select both cancer type and stage.
CEDAR Analysis Resource
CEDAR tools are available both on the CEDAR homepage as well as on nextgen-tools.iedb.org, where each tool related to cancer will have the purple CEDAR logo next to it. CEDAR tools include the following:
- Mutated Peptide Generator: This tool takes a VCF file as input and extracts coding variants to generate corresponding neo-peptides along with their matched wild-type peptides, enabling downstream analysis of potential neoantigens.
- Peptide Variant Comparison: This tool processes amino acid sequences to predict each subsequence’s ability to bind to a specific MHC class I molecule. It accepts paired wild-type and mutant peptides, generating side-by-side binding affinity predictions to facilitate comparative analysis.
- MHC-I Binding: This tool will take in amino acid sequences and determine each subsequence’s ability to bind to a specific MHC class I molecule.
- MHC-II Binding: This tool will take in amino acid sequences and determine each subsequence’s ability to bind to a specific MHC class II molecule.
- Axel-F: The Antigen eXpression-based Epitope Likelihood-Function (AXEL-F) enhances MHC peptide prediction by incorporating the abundance levels of source antigens.
- PepX: The Peptide eXpression annotator (pepX) estimates peptide abundance based on RNA-Seq data from selected public databases, providing expression-based insights for a given peptide input.
- TCRMatch: TCRMatch compares input CDR3β sequences against curated CDR3β sequences in IEDB and CEDAR, identifying matches that are predicted to share epitope specificity.
Contact and the Solutions Center
The IEDB solutions center can be used to troubleshoot and provide information about CEDAR as well, and users are encouraged to use the Discussion forum in order to ask questions and interact with both the CEDAR team and other users. If you have any other questions or inquiries, you can contact CEDAR at cedar@lji.org.