Peptide-pulsed dendritic cells produce little clinical effect.

2003 JUL 9 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- by Michael Greer, senior medical writer - A therapeutic leukemia vaccine prototype based on peptide-pulsed dendritic cells (DCs) has little if any clinical effect, researchers in Japan say.

Tsuyoshi Takahashi and colleagues at the University of Tokyo, Tokyo Metropolitan Komagome Hospital, and the Japanese Red Central Blood Center conducted a pilot study to assess the utility of autologous DCs "pulsed ex vivo with leukemia-specific peptide to stimulate host antitumor immunity when administrated as a vaccine."

Although immunization elicited antileukemia immune activity, the vaccine-induced responses had little practical effect, Takahashi and coauthors found.

In their study, DCs loaded with bcr-abl peptide were administered to three chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) patients. The bcr-abl oncogene is the hallmark of CML.

All three patients showed significant peptide-specific immune activity after intradermal injection of mature peptide-pulsed DCs, according to the report. However, none of the patients achieved a clinical ...