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Published: 2022

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789464586718

Our immune system is essential for the protection against and destruction of pathogens, but also has an important role in cancer and tumor control. Therapy that is committed to use the immune system as anti-cancer strategy is called immunotherapy. Effective immunotherapy depends on the induction and activation of both innate (non-specific) and adaptive (specific and memory) immunity simultaneously combined with inhibition of tumor induced immune suppression. Vaccination, widely applied in the field of virology, can also be exploited in cancer to provide activation signals to the innate and adaptive immune players. Central players of innate and adaptive immunity that need to be instructed by vaccines are antigen presenting cells (APCs) such as dendritic cells (DCs) or Langerhans cells, which are both located in the skin, the prime vaccination site. APCs can be seen as messengers of the immune system that take up antigens, either tumor or pathogen derived, process and present them to T-cells that belong to the adaptive immunity and create specifity and memory. Stimulation of APCs facilitates their migration to lymph nodes where they can establish activation of innate immune cells, such as invariant natural killer T-cells (iNKT) in addition to activation of the adaptive immune response trough cross-presentation of antigens to CD8+ and CD4+ T-cells. These CD8+ and CD4+ T-cells can be respectively seen as effector cells that can kill tumor cells and helper cells that support CD8+ T-cells. iNKT can be described as immune boosters that aid in activation of both CD8+ and CD4+ T-cells, but also DCs and natural killer cells (which can kill tumor cells) but above all iNKT also exert killing capacities themselves. Since APCs play such a central role in the activation of antigen specific T-cell responses and iNKT, it is an attractive strategy to develop vaccines that are specifically delivered to APCs.