Dendritic Cell Therapy

Our bodies are really unique and quite a piece of impressive machinery if you think about all the processes it carries out simultaneously. This has become even more present to me as we have dove into the immune system in class. Just for a little background, dendritic cells are one of the joining pieces between the innate immunity ( what you are born with) and the adaptive immunity ( what builds up over time with encounters with antigens). They have special antigen-presenting molecules on their cell surface, hence why they are called antigen-presenting cells or APCs. Dendritic cells play a very important roll in altering the rest of the immune system that there is an antigen present because they go on to activate T cells and start a cascade of events leading to an effective immune response. Now, that is about all I have learned from Dr. Cramer so far in Microbiology but wanted to investigate how doctors/immunologists were utilizing these cells to maybe help heal a patient.

In a lot of cases, I found out that they are utilized as a therapy to help fight cancer or slow the spread of cancerous tumors. Dendritic cell therapies are often referred to as immunotherapies which involve activating the immune system. There are numerous clinical trials going on around the world but I found this active one in Minnesota, that is targeting liver cancer. They take patients own white blood cells and grow them in a lab in hopes to create “autologous dendritic cells”. These dendritic cells are supposed to have better stimulatory effects, especially when they are administered with a special pneumonia vaccine. The doctors are using this clinical trial to see if the body’s own immune system can be kickstarted again after receiving intense radiotherapy to shrink the tumor. I think it is pretty fascinating to think about how science allows doctors now to take our own body cells and enhance them in a lab to helpful work better within our bodies.

Another way dendritic cell therapies are being used is to try to combat pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer has a very high mortality rate and there is currently no effective form of treatment. Many are looking at dendritic cell vaccines to see if they could be a potential tool. This article talks about how if a dendritic cell vaccine were to be intraperitoneal injected it would stimulate the anti-tumor immune response. Because dendritic cells promote the cytokine toxic T cells by secreting specific cytokines and are great antigen-presenting cells they can turn the immune response into a type 1 response. The hope is that these injections would prevent mastitis of pancreatic cancer. Further on in the article, it talks about how there are not many side effects to this vaccine and that it has been proven clinically safe to use. It also goes on to site-specific clinical trials that are going on right now to hopefully have effective results. That would be huge in the world of cancer if this type of immunotherapy worked for the majority of pancreatic cancer patients! I have been personally impacted by cancer from losing numerous loved ones so reading about all of these clinically trials and vaccines that could possibly work makes me so hopeful!