Transduced tumor cells are prime candidates for becoming tumor vaccines.(Brief Article)

2002 JUL 10 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- by Sonia Nichols, senior medical writer - Vaccine and cancer researchers believe immunogene therapy may be a major way to use the body's own immune response system to treat and eradicate certain types of cancer.

"Immunogene therapy is a novel cancer treatment strategy based on vaccination with irradiated autologous tumor cells transduced with immunostimulatory genes," explained Ian F. Parney, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

To better understand the prospects of using immunogene therapy in humans, Parney and colleagues have examined the responses of glioma and melanoma cells growing in culture when subjected to immunostimulatory transduction.

Parney's group transferred genes for several immunomodulatory factors, including granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF), interleukin (IL)-12, and B7-2, to the tumor cells with retroviruses and evaluated them for transgene expression both before and after irradiation.

Cells transduced with GM-CSF expressed similar levels of GM-CSF both before and after irradiation, but when combined with B7-2 transduction, GM-CSF expression levels were significantly lower. Interleukin-12 expression levels were initially low and fell following irradiation, while B7-2 expression levels remained high and uncompromised by radiation treatment ...