Using a Patient's Tumor to Form Vaccine: Dendritic Cell Vaccine Induces Immune Responses in Patients

A new process for creating a personalized vaccine may become a crucial tool in helping patients with colorectal cancer develop an immune response against their own tumors. This dendritic cell (DC) vaccine, developed at Dartmouth and described in a research paper published this week in the journal Clinical Cancer Research, was used after surgical resection of metastatic tumors to try to prevent the growth of additional metastases.

Dendritic cells are critical to the human body's immune system, helping identify targets, or antigens, and then stimulating the immune system to react against those antigens.; The new research grew dendritic cells from a sample of a patient's blood, mixed them with proteins from the patient's tumor, and then injected the mixture into the patient as a vaccine. The vaccine then stimulated an anti-tumor response from T-cells, a kind of white blood cell that protects the body from disease.

For more information:

http://www.dhmc.org/webpage.cfm?site_id=2&org_id=796&morg_id=0&gsec_id=58203&sec_id=0&item_id=58203

Original Paper:

R. J. Barth, D. A. Fisher, P. K. Wallace, J. Y. Channon, R. J. Noelle, J. Gui, M. S. Ernstoff. A Randomized Trial of Ex vivo CD40L Activation of a Dendritic Cell Vaccine in Colorectal Cancer Patients: Tumor-Specific Immune Responses Are Associated with Improved Survival. Clinical Cancer Research, 2010; 16 (22): 5548 DOI: 10.1158/1078-0432.CCR-10-2138