Impact of culture medium on the expansion of T cells for immunotherapy.

Background Aims: Encouraging evidence of clinical benefits from cancer immunotherapy is beginning to accumulate in several clinical trials. Cancer immunotherapy is based on two main methods, active vaccination and cell-transfer therapy. The ex vivo expansion of T cells is required to monitor vaccine-induced antigen-specific T cells or prepare large numbers of reactive lymphocytes for adoptive transfer.

Dendritic cell vaccine with mRNA targeted to the proteasome by polyubiquitination.

Dendritic cells (DCs) transfected with mRNA encoding tumor-associated antigens (TAAs) can induce tumor-specific T-cell responses. To potentiate this, we transfected mature DCs (mDCs) with mRNA encoding TAA targeted to the proteasome. DCs were generated from bone marrow cells by culture with 20 ng/ml GM-CSF and maturation with 1 microg/ml LPS.