Induction of Protective Anti-Tumor Immunity by Gene-Modified Dendritic Cells

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
The context in which an antigen is presented shapes the nature of the immune response to that antigen and can result in B cell activation, T cell activation, or immune tolerance. To elicit anti-tumor immune responses, various cell types have been employed as cellular adjuvants with tumor antigens, and recently several groups have shown that dendritic cells (DCs), cultured with tumor lysates, tumor antigens, or peptides eluted from tumor cells, induced significant anti-tumor immunity in vivo. In all of these approaches, the DCs were pulsed with an exogenous source of antigen. An alternative method is to engineer DCs to express tumor antigens. We genetically modified DCs to express β-galactosidase (β-gal) as a surrogate tumor antigen and then tested the anti-tumor activity of the β-gal+ DCs in mice against a β-gal+ murine melanoma cell line. A single vaccination with the gene-modified DCs protected mice against a lethal dose of (β-gal-B16 melanoma cells and induced β-gal-specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes. These results demonstrate that expression of tumor antigens by DCs is a potent method of inducing tumor antigen-specific responses in vivo.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: