Technological advances in adoptive immunotherapy

Adoptive immunotherapy is an attractive and elegant strategy for treating a variety of life-threatening diseases. Several approaches have been developed to generate antigen-specific CD4+ and CD8+ T cells for adoptive T-cell therapy in cancer and infectious diseases. Currently, many approaches are based on either the use of autologous peptide pulsed dendritic cells as antigen-presenting cells or nonspecific expansion of T cells. Unfortunately, current approaches lack the ability to serve as reproducible and economically viable methods. Several groups are developing new artificial approaches to overcome problems associated with dendritic cells and the nonspecific expansion of T-cell clones in order to make adoptive immunotherapy more feasible and effective. Thus, by increasing the availability of adoptive immunotherapy, we will be able to better determine the efficacy of the approaches in the treatment of a variety of diseases. In this review, we focus on technological advances that will facilitate adoptive immunotherapy. Specifically, we summarize current strategies which are either based on artificial antigen-presenting cells or on T-cell receptor gene transfer.