Background: Dendritic cell (DC) vaccine is a hopeful approach for cancer treatment. In clinical trials, DC vaccines have produced clinical responses in some cancer patients. However, DC vaccines efficacy is not satisfactory in most types of cancer and more efforts must be done to improve their effectiveness in advanced cancers. Understanding the influence of tumor cells and tumor stromal cells ...

Altering the immunosuppressive microenvironment that exists within a tumor will likely be necessary for cancer vaccines to trigger an effective antitumor response. Monocyte chemoattractant proteins (such as CCL2) are produced by many tumors and have both direct and indirect immunoinhibitory effects. We hypothesized that CCL2 blockade would reduce immunosuppression and augment vaccine immunother...

Dendritic cells (DCs) play a crucial role in the initiation and regulation of the antitumor immune response. Already , DC-based antitumor vaccines have been thoroughly explored both in animal tumor models and in clinical trials. DC-based vaccines are commonly produced from DC progenitors isolated from peripheral blood or bone marrow by culturing in the presence of cytokines, followed by loading...

Donor T cells play a critical role in mediating both harmful graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) and beneficial graft-versus-tumor effect after allogeneic bone marrow transplantation (BMT). We have recently demonstrated a novel treatment strategy to stimulate specific antitumor activity with preservation of tolerance to host antigens after T cell-depleted allogeneic BMT by vaccination of recipient...

PURPOSE The therapeutic effectiveness of cancer vaccines, composed of tumor antigens that are also self-antigens, may be limited by the normal mechanisms that preserve immunological tolerance. Consistent with this notion, we found that vaccination of melanoma patients with recombinant viral vaccines expressing gp100 (a melanoma antigen also expressed by normal melanocytes) produced only transie...

Recent progress in cancer immunotherapy has been remarkable, especially the clinical development of immune checkpoint inhibitors, such as anti-CTLA-4 and anti-PD-1 antibodies. The success of these agents has revealed the importance of anti-tumor immune activities in curing cancers. Cancer peptide vaccines constitute another approach to eliciting and boosting anti-tumor immune responses. While c...

Dendritic cell (DC) based vaccines have emerged as a promising immunotherapy for cancers. However, most DC vaccines so far have achieved only limited success in cancer treatment. Photodynamic therapy (PDT), an established cancer treatment strategy, can cause immunogenic apoptosis to induce an effective antitumor immune response. In this study, we developed a DC-based cancer vaccine using immuno...

Optimum efficacy of therapeutic cancer vaccines may require combinations that generate effective antitumor immune responses, as well as overcome immune evasion and tolerance mechanisms mediated by progressing tumor. Previous studies showed that IL-13Rα2, a unique tumor-associated Ag, is a promising target for cancer immunotherapy. A targeted cytotoxin composed of IL-13 and mutated Pseudomonas e...

We evaluated whether antibody response correlates with tumor therapy by cytokine gene-modified tumor cell vaccines. To characterize the antibody (Ab) response against a known antigen, colon carcinoma C26 cells and C26 variants engineered to produce interleukin (IL) 12 or IL-4 were further transduced to express the human tumor-associated antigen gp38 folate receptor (FR) alpha. Irradiated IL-12-...

We studied the conditions required for eradication by immunization of occult lymph node metastases which remained after surgical removal of an intradermally transplanted cavian hepatoma. Guinea pigs that received no postsurgical treatment all died with progressively growing lymph node metastases. The growth of these metastases could be prevented in a significant proportion of the animals by pos...