Kammertoens Thomas, Blankenstein Thomas
Institute of Immunology, Charité, Campus Benjamin Franklin, Berlin, Germany.
Eur J Immunol. 2009 Sep;39(9):2345-53. doi: 10.1002/eji.200939612.
The interactions between cancer and immune cells are complex. Even though the mutations that cause cancer can create new antigens that are potentially "visible" to T cells, in most experimental model systems the growth of tumors is accompanied by induction of T-cell tolerance towards the tumor. How tolerance to tumors is induced and how tolerance can be broken by immunotherapy have been a main focus in cancer immunology. Here, we discuss experimental models used in cancer immunology. We argue that, while it is obviously easy for tumors to induce tolerance, it should be as easy to circumvent tolerance by the adoptive transfer of tumor-antigen-reactive T cells. Effective adoptive T-cell therapy has become feasible by methods to identify TCR against tumor-associated (self-) antigens with high affinity and to graft a new antigen specificity to patients' T cells by TCR gene transfer.
癌症与免疫细胞之间的相互作用十分复杂。尽管导致癌症的突变能够产生新的抗原，这些抗原对T细胞而言可能是“可见的”，但在大多数实验模型系统中，肿瘤的生长伴随着T细胞对肿瘤的耐受性诱导。肿瘤耐受性是如何诱导产生的，以及免疫疗法如何打破耐受性，一直是癌症免疫学的主要研究重点。在此，我们讨论癌症免疫学中使用的实验模型。我们认为，虽然肿瘤显然很容易诱导耐受性，但通过过继转移肿瘤抗原反应性T细胞来规避耐受性应该同样容易。通过高亲和力鉴定针对肿瘤相关（自身）抗原的TCR，并通过TCR基因转移将新的抗原特异性移植到患者T细胞的方法，有效的过继性T细胞疗法已变得可行。
