AACR - 91st meeting. Dendritic cell vaccine strategies

Inevitably, the sessions on dendritic cells at the AACR Annual Meeting were some of the most consistently well attended. Interest has been intense for several years, largely since the technical obstacles to the routine culture of these cells and their precursors, both from animal and human sources, were removed in the early 1990s. Several important advances were presented towards further optimizing dendritic cell-based immunotherapy in general. Groups reported on improved culture conditions, as well as more efficient means of obtaining larger quantities of dendritic cells or their precursors. As expected, there were several strong reports on the beneficial bioactivity of cytokines, such as IL-12, GM-CSF, and IL-2. In addition, enticing work continues with Flt3-ligand and has begun with progenipoietin, a more recently identified hematopoietic growth factor. As shown in this year's sessions, the clinical promise of tumor lysate and apoptotic bodies continues to move steadily from the bench to the clinic. Finally, although dendritic cells are excellent antigen-presenters, work to determine if they could be engineered to be even more effective continues. As a result, several reports were given on gene-modifying this type of immune cell.