The emerging role of the dendritic cell in novel cancer therapies.

Research over the last two years has explored a number of possible approaches to applying dendritic cell immunotherapy to the treatment of human cancers. The chosen strategy in clinical situations will vary for individual patients and will depend on the type of tumour, availability of tissue samples and potential source of dendritic cells. We believe that the isolation of fractionated tumour peptide from individual patients' tumours for use with autologous stem cell-derived dendritic cells may provide, in at least some cases, an effective and practical approach to cancer immunotherapy. This approach will provide a 'closed' system of tumour immunotherapy with all components (dendritic cells, antigen and cytotoxic T lymphocytes) being provided by the patient and applied in a tailor-made fashion to individual patients as an adjuvant to current anti-tumour therapies.