Page 121 - Bio Engineering Approaches to Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment

5.1 Adoptive cell-based therapy in combination with chemotherapy 119

They work on the mouse breast cancer resection model and showed how this scaf-
fold effectively worked and how reduced tumor relapse compared to conventional
delivery methods. They have also demonstrated how biopolymer scaffolds could
evoke an antitumor immune response with the ability to eliminating widespread
tumor metastases [17].

5.1.4 Dendritic cell-based therapy
Dendritic cells (DCs) are the types of antigen-presenting cells in the immune system
[18,2]. Their primary function is the processing of antigens and the delivery of anti-
gens in the primary response to naïve cells and the secondary response to memory
B cells. There are mature and immature DCs. The main function of immature DCs
is antigen-capturing, whereas for the mature DCs is antigen-presenting. In in vivo,
what make the DCs mature is their ability to migrate from the peripheral tissue to
draining lymphoid organ [18].
These DCs contain antigens that move to naïve T cells. It induces a cellular
immune response which contains both CD4+ T cells and CD8 + T cells. Activation
of Naïve and memory B cells by DCs makes them an important cell in transferring
humoral immunity. They also can activate natural killer (NK) cell and natural killer
T (NKT) cells [19].
The immunogenicity DCs have been shown in patients with cancer or chronic
HIV infection.
DCs have a crucial role in determining the type of response that is induced.
Activation of adaptive and innate immunity by DCs is an important ability that have
been caused them to be used in vaccination in particular in cancer therapy [19,20].
Vaccination using DCs are able to induce an immunologic response, to increase the
number of tumor antigens. Failure to delivery of tumor antigen to the target place is a
limitation of cancer therapy. However, to overcome the limitation, DC-based therapy
has been used in combination with other techniques.
By the generation of functional antigen-specific T cells researchers have also
tried to solve this problem.
Despite some challenges regarding measuring the immunological effect of DC
vaccination, some clinical trials have shown positive results but its cost is a crucial
problem that still needs to be solved in order to this technique become useful for all
patients [20].
Needs to treat cancer increase the attention of researchers to the innovation of
new techniques with low cost to eradicate this mysterious disease. Adoptive cell
therapy (ACT) recently has recognized as a method for cancer therapy that includes
the administration of the immune cells with anticancer activity. Despite promising
results that it has especially in CAR T cell therapy for the treatment of patients with
melanoma, it has some limitations that in all three techniques are different. But in
all, toxicity is the main problem due to the targeting of normal cells by these modi-
fied cells. Biomedical engineering, genetic engineering, and T cell engineering are
needed to reduce this toxicity and increase its efficiency.