ABSTRACT
Phage display technology has been developed as a powerful tool for selecting polypeptides or proteins with desired biological and physicochemical properties from huge random peptide libraries.Fragments of foreign peptides or proteins that are expressed as fused proteins displayed on the phage surface can keep their relatively independent spatial structure and biological activity,so that they can interact with their ligands to mimic selection of specific molecular epitopes,thus providing an efficient high-throughput screening system.Phage display has been used to allow rapid identification of peptide ligands for a variety of target molecules by an in vitro selection process called "panning".Phage display techniques can be widely exploited to construct tumor-associated antibody libraries,select polypeptides tumor-associated antigen,investigate antigen epitope and design vaccines and medicine,and are used especially as a tool for the diagnosis and treatment of tumor,gene therapy and tumor cell signal transduction research.Recent applications and advanced developments of phage display in cancer research are discussed in this article for the further reference to investigators.