Dendritic cell therapy: a proactive approach against cancer immunotherapy

Cancer is one of the biggest challenges of modern medicine. Though there are different therapies in general like chemotherapy, radiation and surgery. Further, cancer is highly heterogeneous. Two persons, who suffer from the same type of cancer, can show totally different variations and ways of progress. That makes it hard to treat the cancer and just for that reason oncology is one field where personalized medicine is advancing extremely fast. The more that treatments can be tailored to the single patient, the higher are the chances of treating that patient’s cancer effectively. Personalization creating a special tailored therapy for everybody wasn’t possible before. The goal is to allow patients a pain free time at least for a while, to improve the quality of life and to dam up the growth of the tumor. To reach that goal, now researchers concentrate on the power of the human immune system and its improvement to treat cancers with immunotherapy. Dendritic cells (DCs) play a central role in the initiation and regulation of innate and adaptive immune responses and have increasingly been applied as vaccines for cancer patients. In vitro generation of dendritic cells from monocytes and antigen loading into immature dendritic cells to proper maturation, with the aim of imprinting different DC functions that are essential for their subsequent induction of a T cell-mediated immune response against tumor.