Interleukin-15 dendritic cells as vaccine candidates for cancer immunotherapy

Abstract

Owing to their professional antigenpresenting capacity and unique potential to induce tumor antigen-specific T cell immunity, dendritic cells (DCs) have attracted much interest over the past decades for therapeutic vaccination against cancer. Clinical trials have shown that the use of tumor antigenloaded DCs in cancer patients is safe and that it has the potential to induce antitumor immunity which, in some cases, culminates in striking clinical responses. Unfortunately, in a considerable number of patients, DC vaccination is unable to mount effective anti-tumor immune responses and, if it does so, the resultant immunity is often insufficient to translate into tangible clinical benefit. This underscores the necessity to re-design and optimize the current procedures for DC vaccine manufacturing. A new generation of DC vaccines with improved potency has now become available for clinical use as a result of extensive preclinical research. One of the promising next-generation DC vaccine candidates are interleukin (IL)-15-differentiated DCs. In this commentary, we will compile the research data that have been obtained by our group and other groups with these so-called IL-15 DCs and summarize the evidence supporting the implementation of IL-15 DCs in DC-based cancer vaccination regimens. © 2013 Landes Bioscience.