Based on encouraging in vitro results, Fotaki et al. aimed to develop an off-the-shelf dendritic cell (DC) vaccine by delivering allogeneic, pro-inflammatory DCs expressing gp100 to melanoma-bearing mice. In response, host bystander DCs migrated to draining lymph nodes and showed markers of activation, NK cells and neutrophils were recruited to the injection site, and gp100-specific CD8+ T cells were generated. Additional adoptive transfer of gp100-specific T cells yielded a slight survival benefit.

Autologous patient-derived dendritic cells (DCs) modified ex vivo to present tumor-associated antigens (TAAs) are frequently used as cancer vaccines. However, apart from the stringent logistics in producing DCs on a patient basis, accumulating evidence indicate that ex vivo engineered DCs are poor in migration and in fact do not directly present TAA epitopes to naive T cells in vivo. Instead, it is proposed that bystander host DCs take up material from vaccine-DCs, migrate and subsequently initiate antitumor T-cell responses. We used mouse models to examine the possibility of using pro-inflammatory allogeneic DCs (alloDCs) to activate host DCs and enable them to promote antigen-specific T-cell immunity. We found that alloDCs were able to initiate host DC activation and migration to draining lymph node leading to T-cell activation. The pro-inflammatory milieu created by alloDCs also led to recruitment of NK cells and neutrophils at the site of injection. Vaccination with alloDCs combined with Ad5M(gp100), an infection-enhanced adenovirus encoding the human melanoma-associated antigen gp100 resulted in generation of CD8(+) T cells with a T-cell receptor (TCR) specific for the gp10025-33 epitope (gp100-TCR(+)). Ad5M(gp100)-alloDC vaccination in combination with transfer of gp100-specific pmel-1 T cells resulted in prolonged survival of B16-F10 melanoma-bearing mice and altered the composition of the tumor microenvironment (TME). We hereby propose that alloDCs together with TAA- or neoepitope-encoding Ad5M can become an "off-the-shelf" cancer vaccine, which can reverse the TME-induced immunosuppression and induce host cellular anti-tumor immune responses in patients without the need of a time-consuming preparation step of autologous DCs.

Author Info: (1) Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology, Science for Life Laboratory, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden. (2) Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology, Scienc

Author Info: (1) Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology, Science for Life Laboratory, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden. (2) Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology, Science for Life Laboratory, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden. (3) Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology, Science for Life Laboratory, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden. (4) Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology, Science for Life Laboratory, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden. (5) Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology, Science for Life Laboratory, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden. (6) Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology, Science for Life Laboratory, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden. Immunicum AB, Gothenburg Sweden. (7) Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology, Science for Life Laboratory, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden. (8) Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology, Science for Life Laboratory, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden.