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Quality and quantity: new strategies to improve immunotherapy of cancer

Christine Krueger1, Jonathan P Schneck, Mathias Oelke

  • 1Department of Pathology & Medicine, The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland 21205, USA.

Trends in Molecular Medicine
|May 4, 2004
PubMed

Adoptive immunotherapy is a promising approach for the treatment of infectious diseases and cancer. Several lines of research are currently focusing on the development of different technologies to facilitate the induction and expansion of antigen-specific T cells. Here, we discuss two current articles that affect the field of adoptive immunotherapy. One article describes the engineering of artificial antigen-presenting cells, which promise to replace the cumbersome dendritic-cell approach for the in vitro generation of large numbers of antigen-specific T cells. The second development is a description of a new technique for the detection of functionally active antigen-specific T cells, which will enhance the ability to control the quality of the T cells to be used in adoptive immunotherapy. Together, these exciting findings will advance the field of immunotherapy.

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