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Updated: Jun 20, 2026
Development and Functional Characterization of Murine Tolerogenic Dendritic Cells
Published on: May 18, 2018
Cytokine-based log-scale expansion of functional murine dendritic cells
Yui Harada1, Yasuji Ueda, Hiroaki Kinoh
1Department of Gene Therapy, Chiba University Graduate School of Medicine, Chiba, Japan.
Background:
Limitations of the clinical efficacy of dendritic cell (DC)-based immunotherapy, as well as difficulties in their industrial production, are largely related to the limited number of autologous DCs from each patient. We here established a possible breakthrough, a simple and cytokine-based culture method to realize a log-scale order of functional murine DCs (>1,000-fold), which cells were used as a model before moving to human studies.
Methodology/Principal Findings:
Floating cultivation of lineage-negative hematopoietic progenitors from bone marrow in an optimized cytokine cocktail (FLT3-L, IL-3, IL-6, and SCF) led to a stable log-scale proliferation of these cells, and a subsequent differentiation study using IL-4/GM-CSF revealed that 3-weeks of expansion was optimal to produce CD11b+/CD11c+ DC-like cells. The expanded DCs had typical features of conventional myeloid DCs in vitro and in vivo, including identical efficacy as tumor vaccines.
Conclusions/Significance:
The concept of DC expansion should make a significant contribution to the progress of DC-based immunotherapy.
