Advanced therapeutic dendritic cell vaccines

By designing dendritic cell vaccines we aim to establish powerful anti-tumor specific T-cell activity and memory T-cell formation resulting in long-term disease control.

There is a clear medical need to develop novel therapies that improve survival chances for certain solid tumors and relapsed leukemia, as they remain refractory to current treatments. Immunotherapy seems particular attractive in the allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) setting as the newly developing immune system has great potential to induce long-lasting anti-tumor immunity. Cord blood (CB) as (stem) cell source for allo-HCT is emerging and has advantages over bone marrow including a stronger graft-versus-tumor effect. Recent data suggest that T-cells proliferating in the patient after CB-transplantation can readily develop into antigen-specific cells, which provides the opportunity to skew the developing adaptive immune system towards anti-tumor reactivity. Dendritic cells (DCs) are particularly suitable as they are professional antigen presenting cells that instruct naïve antigen-specific T-cells.

Mission and Approach:

We have developed DC-vaccines derived from the same CB-unit used for HCT (currently in preparation for a clinical trial).  We are improving these vaccines, using state of the art technologies aiming to establish powerful anti-tumor specific T-cell activity and memory T-cell formation against various tumours. In addition, we work on individualizing the conditioning regimens aiming to predict immune reconstitution after allo-HCT to optimize the effect of the cell vaccines.