To bead or not to bead

To bead or not to bead, that is the question posed by Ito et al. in this issue of the Journal of Immunotherapy. The generation of tumor-reactive T cells remains a major impediment to the wider application of adoptive cell transfer (ACT) therapy for the treatment of patients with cancer. Ito et al. used lymph nodes of mice draining implanted sarcomas as an enriched source of tumor antigen-specific cells. They investigated the ex vivo activation of the lymph node cells by artificial antigen presenting cells (aAPCs) for the production of therapeutic T cell cultures. The optimal aAPC consisted of magnetic beads coated with anti-CD3 and anti-CD28 antibodies. Short-term ex vivo culture with the aAPCs led to a selective expansion and/or activation of tumor antigen specific CD4+ cells. These results lay a solid foundation for the clinical application of bead-based T cell activation, and promote efforts to develop the therapeutic strategy of in vivo immunization, ex vivo T cell activation, and adoptive cell transfer.