Anti-tumor Effects Of CTL Induced By Different Subsets Of Dendritic Cells In Vitro

BACKGROUNDDendritic cells are nature's best antigen-presenting cells. DCs are not pure but heterogeneous which could be assigned to two groups by their immunocompetence: DCs for immune activity and DCs for immune tolerance. The former are mostly mature DCs and the latter are mostly immature DCs. Researches for mDC are concentrate on tumor, hepatitis B, etc and for imDC are concentrate on transplant, autoimmune disease, etc.DC vaccines are always made by been pulsed with tumor peptide or complex antigen in anti-tumor immunotherapy. When using tumor peptide, patient's MHC background and knowledge of correlative epitope are needed. DCs loaded tumor peptide are especially limited because tumor peptide which have been identified are finite and the immune activity of CTL against single antigen peptide are comparatively feebleness.There are two advantages of using DCs pulsed with complex antigen compared with the former. Firstly, the identification, uptake, dispose and presentation of antigen are completed by DCs directly so that the complicated process of antigen identify is avoided. Secondly, complex antigen contains multiple known or unknown tumor-associated-antigens, so CTL induced by DCs pulsed with complex antigen have stronger anti-tumor activity. The mainly disadvantage of complex antigen is...