Microarray analysis for a comprehensive immunological-status evaluation during cancer vaccine immune monitoring

Abstract

Anticancer immune responses can be enhanced by immune intervention that promotes complex biological mechanisms involving several cellular populations. The classical immune monitoring for biological-based cancer clinical trials is often based on single-cell analysis. However, the overall effect could be lost by such a reductionist approach explaining the lack of correlation among clinical and immunological endpoints often reported. Microarray technology could give the possibility of studying in a multiparametric setting the immune therapy effects. The application of microarray is leading to an improved understanding of the immune responses to tumor immunotherapy. In fact, analysis of cancer vaccine-induced host responses using microarrays is proposed as valuable alternative to the standard cell-based methods. This paper shows successful examples of how high-throughput gene expression profiling contributed to the understanding of anticancer immune responses during biological therapy, introducing as well the integrative platforms that allow the network analysis in molecular biology studies. Copyright © 2011 Vladia Monsurr and Francesco M. Marincola.