Dendritic Cell Cancer Vaccines: Clinical Production for Cancer Immunotherapy

Dendritic cell (DC) cancer vaccines are used to circumvent the problem that DCs in patients with cancer usually do not mature properly in the cancer environment. Peripheral DCs are fewer in number and hard to isolate cleanly. Instead, autologous DCs can be matured from monocyte precursors obtained by apheresis and elutriation from peripheral blood. Here, we describe procedures for harvesting cells, growing them into DCs, inducing antigen expression by pulsing them with antigenic peptides or inducing antigen expression by transducing them with antigens expressed by a recombinant adenovirus (or other viral vector), maturing them in vitro, and then administering them to patients.