DC-based cancer vaccines.

Because of the large preexisting antigenic load and immunosuppressive environment within a tumor, inducing therapeutically useful antitumor immunity in cancer patients requires the development of powerful vaccination protocols. An approach gaining increasing popularity in the tumor vaccine field is to immunize cancer patients with their own DCs loaded ex vivo with tumor antigens. The underlying premise of this approach is that the efficiency and control over the vaccination process provided by ex vivo manipulation of the DCs generates an optimally potent APC and a superior method for stimulating antitumor immunity in vivo compared with the more conventional direct vaccination methods, offsetting the added cost and complexity associated with this form of customized cell therapy.