Transfusion Of Autologous Cytokine-Induced Killer Cells And Its Evaluation For Patients With Chronic Hepatitis C

Hepatitis C virus (HCV), a single-strand positive RNA virus with membrane, can trigger acute or chronic hepatitis, liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma, which seriously threat the humans worldwide. There have been many progresses in the treatment of patients with chronic hepatitis C (CHC) during the last decade. Conventional or Pegylated IFN-a can be used alone or in combination with ribavirin. Although there are still about 50-60% patients who are responders to antiviral therapy, but its efficacy is limited as followings reasons: IFN-αcannot eradicate the HCV in vivo; there is a viral rebound for some patients after the end point of treatment; the patients with de-compensated liver cirrhosis are not tolerable to IFN treatment..Recent reports have demonstrated that strong HCV-specific T-cell responses (CD4~+ and CD8~+ T cells) are crucial in viral clearance. Cytokine-induced killer cells (CIK) are generated from peripheral blood mononuclear cells upon the stimulation of cytokine cocktails, and mainly consist of CD3~+CD56~+ and CD3~+CD8~+ cells as the major effector cells. Because the strongly enhanced T and NK cell response, CIK can induce effective tumor and viral responses in vivo. In this study, we investigated the CIK transfusion and its treatment efficacy in patients with chronic hepatitis C.Twenty patients with CHC (CHC) were enrolled in this study. during the incubation of PBMCs of the patients in vitro, CD8~+ and CD4~+ T cells reached the peak in number during day 7 and day 10 respectively. By contrast, NK and NKT cell proliferated and their numbers went to the highest levels during day 10 and day 15. After autologous transfusion of CIK cells, we found that there was significant suppression of viral replication in treated patients. Among the patients with CHC plus liver cirrhosis (n=9), 3 cases (33.3%) were complete responders and 5 cases (55.6%) were partial responders, and only 1 case (9.1%) exhibited no response to the adoptive therapy. In 11 patients with CHC plus hepatocelluar carcinoma, 1 case were complete responders and 8 were parital responders and 2 cases showed no response to this therapy. Along the CIK therapy, there were no complications except fever.In conclusion, CIK therapy is not only tolerable for HCV patients, but also significantly suppress the viral replication through boosting the immune response in patients with chronic hepatitis C. Thus, it likely represents a hopeful therapeuticapproach for clinical treatment of patients with chronic hepatitis C.