CpG Oligodeoxynucleotide1826 combined with radioresistant cancer cell vaccine confers significant antitumor effects

Immunotherapy is a hot issue in cancer research over the years and tumor cell vaccine is one of the increasing number of studies. Although the whole tumor cell vaccine can provide the best source of immunizing antigens, there is still a limitation that most tumors are not naturally immunogenic. CpG Oligodeoxynucleotides (CpG ODNs), synthetic oligonucleotides containing a cytosine-phosphate-guanine(CpG) motif, was shown to enhance immune responses to a wide variety of antigens. In this study, we generated the radioresistant Lewis lung cancer cell by repeated X-ray radiation and inactivated it as a whole tumor cell vaccine to enhance the immunogenicity of tumor cell vaccine. Mice were subcutaneously immunized with this inactivated vaccine combined with CpG ODN1826 and then inoculated with autologous Lewis lung cancer (LLC) to estimate the antitumor efficacy. The results showed that the radioresistant tumor cell vaccine combined with CpG ODN1826 could significantly inhibit tumor growth, increased survival of the mice and with 20% of the mice surviving tumor free in vivo compared with the unimmunized mice bearing LLC tumor. A significant increase of apoptosis was also observed in the tumor prophylactically immunized with vaccine of inactivated radioresistant tumor cell plus CpG ODN1826. The potent antitumor effect correlated with higher secretion levels of tumor necrosis factor-alpha(TNF-α) and lower levels of interleukin-10(IL-10) concentration in serum. Furthermore, the results suggested that the antitumor mechanism was probably depended on the decreased level of programmed death ligand-1(PD-L1) which plays an important role in the negative regulation of immune response by the inhibition of tumor antigen-specific T cell activation. These findings clearly demonstrated that the radioresistant tumor cell vaccine combined with CpG ODN1826 as an appropriate adjuvant could induce effective antitumor immunity in vivo.