Recent Advances in Antitumor Dendritic Cell Vaccines

Dendritic cells (DCs) are the most important antigen-presenting cells in the body and play a key role in antigen recognition, uptake, processing, and presentation and mediate nonspecific immunity and specific immunity. To summarize the main findings that DC vaccines are a new immunotherapy scheme combining the strengths of tumor antigens and DCs that can boost the body's identification and clearance of tumors. In this review, the authors focus on the biological characteristics of DCs, recent advances in the understanding of antitumor mechanisms, and the classification of DC vaccines. The current progress of DC-based vaccine immunotherapy for common tumors with high morbidity or mortality in China were systematically summarize. The DC vaccines combining the strengths of tumor antigens will provide directions to explore reasonable, safe, and effective combination immunotherapy strategies for tumors in the future.