Fusion of Breast Carcinoma and Dendritic Cells as a Vaccine for the Treatment of Metastatic Breast Cancer. Addendum.

摘要

The main objective of the study is to vaccinate patients with metastatic breast cancer with a viable dendritic cell (DC)/breast cancer fusions in conjuction with IL-12 to induce an immunological response with the hope that this combination would further enhance vaccine response by promoting Th1 cytokine induction and T cell activation. In this approach, the entire repertoire of tumor antigens, including those yet to be identified, are expressed with the immune-stimulating machinery of the DCs. The fusion cell vaccine allows for induction of helper T and CTL responses by class II presentation of exogenous protein and class I presentation of newly synthesized endogenous protein. Several of our clinical studies have demonstrated that vaccination with fusion cells was well tolerated, induced immunologic responses in a majority of patients, and results in disease regression in subset of patients. This brief report details the characterization of tumor cells and dendritic cells generated from patient BV01 with metastatic breast cancer following isolation from pleural effusions and leukapheresis, respectively.