Page 99 - Bio Engineering Approaches to Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment

4.6 Cancer vaccine 97

FIGURE 4.13 Main strategies in cancer vaccine production.

It would be worthy to illustrate divergent strategies in the way of cancer vaccine
production. In spite of ancient infectious prohibition vaccines with the purpose of
prevention, cancer vaccines are on the basis of triggering the immune system, promi-
nently the CD8 + T cell in order to combat the cancer [73].

4.6.1.1 Dendritic cell vaccine
Dendritic cells control the activity of B cells and T cells, by moving and migrating to
lymphatic organs and by secretion of cytokines, they ignite immune responses [79].
From the aforementioned information, DCs have considered to be one of the
most useful APCs, that could help the sensitization of MHC restricted T cells to
commence the immune responses [79,80]. To illustrate the functional ability of DCs
in cancer vaccination it is not necessary to mention that tumor has the ability to sup-
press the maturity and trigger apoptosis of body DCs. DCs vaccines are exogenous
APCs which could compensate the tumor suppression effect and motivate specific T
cells recognizing tumor antigens [73].
In 1995 the first DC vaccine prepared for clinical trial on patients with meta-
static melanoma, patients were administrated with APCs along with nanopeptide of
MAGE-1 [81].
Some other investigation on DCs transfecting with tumor RNAs and DNAs, these
vaccines have shown immunogenic responses [82-84].