Basic components of the immune system part 157

CELLULAR VACCINES  AND MODULATION THEREOF

DENDRITIC CELL VACCINES

Recently, much attention has focused on the area of dendritic cell vaccines in the treatment of cancers. The immunological basis of current approaches to therapeutic cancer vaccination (often called "vacci-treatment") has been established over the past decade or longer. These new developments are mainly based on the lessons learned from the clinical testing of these approaches. In particular, three lessons are  worthy of note:

• First, recent randomized phase III trials suggest that vacci-treatment with autologous DCs expressing prostatic acid phosphatase or with autologous tumor-derived heat shock protein (HSP gp96) peptide complexes are showing progress in cancer patient survivals.
• Second, immunological monitoring of many clinical trials has failed to identify a surrogate marker for clinical outcomes.
• Third, many articles and reviews  suggest that protective immunity to human cancer is elicited by the mutated antigenic repertoire unique to each cancer.