Advances and perspectives of dendritic cell-based active immunotherapies in follicular lymphoma

AbstractFollicular lymphoma (FL) is a remarkably immune-responsive malignancy, which is still considered incurable. As, standard immunochemotherapy is complex, toxic and not curative, improvement in FL care is now a crucial topic in hemato-oncology. Recently, we and others have shown that dendritic cell (DC)-based therapies allow a specific immune response associated with sustained lymphoma regression in a proportion of low-tumor burden FL patients. Importantly, the rate of objective clinical response (33 –50%) and of sustained remission is remarkably higher compared to similar studies in solid tumors, corroborating the assumption of the immune responsiveness of FL. Our experimental intra-tumoral strategy combined injection with rituximab and interferon-α-derived dendritic cells (IFN-DC), a novel DC population particularly efficient in biasing T-helper response toward the Th1 type and in the cross-priming of CD8 + T cells. Noteworthy, intra-tumoral injection of DC is a new therapeutic option based on the assumption that following the induction of cancer-cell immunogenic death, unloaded D C would phagocytize in vivo the tumor associated antigens and give rise to a specific immune response. This approach allows the design of easy and inexpensive schedules. On the other hand, advanced and straightforward methods to produce clinical-grade antigenic formulations are currently under devel opment. Both unloaded DC strategies and DC-vaccines are suited for combination with rad...
Source: Cancer Immunology, Immunotherapy - Category: Cancer & Oncology Source Type: research