What
is DC Therapy?
Dendritic Cell (DC) Therapy or so-called
Dendritic Cell vaccine is a newly emerging
and potent form of immune therapy used
to treat cancer. Only recently (2010) approved by the US FDA, dendritic cell therapy
is an immune therapy which harnesses
the body's own immune system to fight
cancer. The dendritic cell itself is
an immune cell whose role is the recognition,
processing and presentation of foreign
antigens to the T-cells in the effector
arm of the immune system. Although dendritic cell are potent cells, they are not usually
present in adequate quantity to allow
for a potent immune response. Dendritic cell therapy
thus involves the harvesting of blood
cells (monocytes)
from a patient and processing them in
the laboratory to produce dendritic cells which
are then given back to a patient in
order to allow massive dendritic cell participation
in optimally activating the immune system.
To learn more about vaccine and dendritic cell therapy
for cancer, please read the following
articles:
The National Cancer Institute has a
very concise primer on Treating
and Preventing Cancer with Vaccines
on their site.
"Dendritic cells and immunity against cancer" by K. Palucka, H. Ueno1, J. Fay, and J. Banchereau of Baylor Institute for Immunology Research and Sammons Cancer Center, Baylor University Medical Center,Dallas, TX; and Department
of Gene and Cell Medicine and Department of Medicine, Immunology Institute, Mount SinaiSchool ofMedicine, New York,NY,USA as published in Journal of Internal Medicine.
Volume 269, Issue 1, 2010.
“Dendritic
Cells (I): Biological functions”
and “Dendritic
Cells (II) Role and therapeutic implications
in cancer” by S. Satthaporn
and O. Eremin of the U. of Nottingham
and Lincoln County Hospital, UK as published
in J. of the Royal College Surgeons,
Edinb.
46:9-20 and 159-167, 2001.
“Clinical
Applications of Dendritic Cell Cancer
Vaccines” by Dr. Joseph
Barr of the U. of Pittsburgh Cancer
Institute, Pittsburgh, PA USA in The
Oncologist 4(2): 140-144, 1999.
Also, a slide show / lecture presentation
by Dr. Michael Morse on “Current
Status of Dendritic-Cell Vaccines”
is available on the Medscape site from
WebMD as part of an educational session
on “Therapeutic Cancer Vaccines: Targeting
the Future of Cancer Treatment” but
requires registration to enter the site.
A youtube video presentation on "Using Dendritic Cells to Create Cancer Vaccines" by Professor Edgar Engleman of Standford University is here.
Abstracts of recent reviews on Pubmed
include articles by IG Schmidt-Wolf
et al. on “Dendritic
Cell, the immunotherapeutic cell for
cancer”, TL Whiteside
and C Odous from U. of Pittsburgh Cancer
Institute on “Dendritic
cell biology and cancer therapy”,
EM Hersh et al. on “Clinical
Applications of dendritic cell vaccination
in the treatment of cancer”
Also, please refer to our Research
Archives for many related
abstracts on the therapy.
Also see
FAQ
