Department of Internal Medicine Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, One Medical Center Drive, Lebanon, NH, 03756, USA.
Exp Hematol Oncol. 2013 Mar 9;2(1):8. doi: 10.1186/2162-3619-2-8.
Among the dendritic cell (DC) subsets, plasmacytoid DC's (pDC) are thought to be important in the generation of both antiviral and antitumor responses. While pDC may be useful in developing dendritic cell-based tumor vaccines, the low frequency of these cells in the peripheral blood has hampered attempts to understand their biology. To provide better insight into the biology of pDC, we isolated these unperturbed cells from the peripheral blood of healthy donors in order to further characterize their gene expression. Using gene array technology we compared the genetic profiles of these cells to those of CD14+ monocytes isolated from the same donors and found several immune related genes upregulated in this cell population. This is the first description, to our knowledge, of gene expression in this subset of DCs obtained from the peripheral blood of adult human donors without exposure in vitro to cytokine or growth factors. Understanding the natural genetic profiles of this dendritic cell subtype as well as others such as the BDCA-1 expressing myeloid DCs may enable us to manipulate these cells ex-vivo to generate enhanced DC-based tumor vaccines inducing more robust antitumor responses.
在树突状细胞 (DC) 亚群中，浆细胞样树突状细胞 (pDC) 被认为在抗病毒和抗肿瘤反应的产生中很重要。虽然 pDC 可能对开发基于树突状细胞的肿瘤疫苗有用，但这些细胞在外周血中的频率较低，这阻碍了对其生物学特性的理解。为了更好地了解 pDC 的生物学特性，我们从健康供体的外周血中分离出这些未受干扰的细胞，以进一步表征它们的基因表达。我们使用基因芯片技术比较了这些细胞与从同一供体分离的 CD14+单核细胞的基因图谱，发现该细胞群体中有几个免疫相关基因上调。据我们所知，这是首次在未体外接触细胞因子或生长因子的情况下，从成人供体的外周血中获得的这种 DC 亚群的基因表达描述。了解这种树突状细胞亚型以及其他表达 BDCA-1 的髓样树突状细胞的天然遗传特征，可能使我们能够在体外对这些细胞进行操作，以产生增强的基于树突状细胞的肿瘤疫苗，从而诱导更强大的抗肿瘤反应。
