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July 24, 2002

U.S. IMMUNIZATION NEWS

"Exploiting Dendritic Cells to Improve Vaccine Efficacy" Journal of Clinical Investigation Online (www.jci.org) (06/01/02) Vol. 109, No. 12, P. 1519; Steinman, Ralph M.; Pope, Melissa

Despite the availability of information on the HIV-1 genome and its proteins, as well as a number of antigens that interact with the human immune system, researchers have not been able to create viable candidate vaccines that produce the kind of long-lasting T-cell mediated immunity scientists believe will be required to prevent HIV infection.  Other diseases that are T-cell mediated--like malaria, tuberculosis, herpes simplex virus, papilloma virus, Epstein-Barr virus, and hepatitis C virus--are also without vaccines, suggesting that past research areas are not likely to result in a vaccine and prompting the authors to suggest the field of dendritic cell (DC) physiology as a new pathway for development.  DCs capture antigens, alter them into peptides, and help the immune system produce its response--as well as controlling the strength and duration of that response and helping T-cells create a memory of disease, one of the basic goals of vaccination.  In addition, though usually just 1 percent of cells in a population are DCs, they are 100 times more common than T-cells, and appear in significant numbers in the lymph nodes, where T-cells recirculate.  In some cases, vaccination with DCs has caused protective immunity against infection and tumors and even autoimmunity against some self antigens, and they can be exposed to an antigen either in vivo or ex vivo.  DNA vaccines, in particular, could provide a strong vaccination with DCs by transfecting them with the vaccine and making them part of the immune priming process.

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