CD8A and neoplasm: Confirming the pivotal role of CD8+ T cells, HER2-specific CD8+ CTLs specifically lysing HER2-expressing tumor cells were required to protect mice from HER2-positive tumor growth since antibody-mediated depletion of these cells abrogated the protective effects conferred by scFvNLDC-145-HER2 vaccine (Additional file 2: Figure S2), which is also consistent with the previous studies [34,35].