Eliciting cytotoxic T lymphocytes against human laryngeal cancer-derived antigens: Evaluation of dendritic cells pulsed with a heat-treated tumor lysate and other antigen-loading strategies for dendritic-cell-based vaccination

Background: dendritic cells (dcs) have been used successfully in clinical pilot studies. however,tumor-specific immunity and clinical responses were only induced in certain cancer patients. it has been well documented that immunotherapy efficacy can be optimized for responses using antigen pulsing. methods: the human laryngeal squamous cell cancer (lscc) cell line snu899 was used to evaluate the in vitro anti-tumor efficacy of three different preparations of dendritic cell (dc) vaccines consisting of either whole tumor cells or their derivatives including: i) dcs pulsed with a tumor cell supernatant (dc-tcs),ii) dcs pulsed with whole-cell tumor stressed lysate (dc-tsl),and iii) dcs pulsed with irradiated tumor cells (dc-itc). results: our results showed that dc-tsl is an effective source of tumor-associated antigens (taas) for pulsing dcs. dc-tsl induced the highest expansion of taa-specific t cells,the strongest th1 cytokine response,and the most potent cytotoxic t lymphocyte (ctl) activity. dc-tcs and dc-itc inhibited t cell activation but induced a certain extent of ctl activity. conclusions: these data suggest that dc-tsl is a more potent inducer of antitumor immunity against laryngeal cancer than other antigen-loading strategies using whole tumor cell materials. this strategy provides an alternative approach for dc-based immunotherapy for laryngeal cancer. © 2016 wei et al.