The BDCA antibodies allowed reliable measurement of dendritic cell (DC) subsets and B cell numbers in the blood of normal subjects, and patients with MM throughout the disease course. The numbers of blood myeloid DC (BmDC) and blood plasmacytoid DC (BpDC) are low throughout the course of the disease, and only improve for a short period of time following autologous HSCT. Thalidomide therapy of patients with relapsed disease was associated with an increase in BmDC1 and BpDC numbers. Monocytes, mobilised at the time of stem cell collection, were used to produce mature DC (matDC) from MM patients and normal donors (ND). The matDC produced from MM patients were of poorer quality as compared to those from ND, despite using combinations of GM/IL-4, GM/IL-13, X4 and MIMIC in the production process. The combinations that contained the X4 maturation cocktail produced the best quality matDC. The DC/T cell system is abnormal in MM patients. Despite this, it is possible to produce antigen loaded mature MoDC from MM patients. When combined with T cell pre-stimulation and IL-2 expansion, these DC are capable of inducing anti-MM cytotoxic T cells, which exhibit considerable anti-MM cytolytic activity. However, the DC from MM patients still display abnormal chemokine receptor expression, which may inhibit their capability to migrate to lymph nodes in-vivo in order to generate these cytotoxic T cell responses. These observations will aid in the optimisation of DC based immune therapies for MM, and suggest that a combined immunotherapy approach using pre-stimulated T cells, MM Ag primed DC and IL-2 may produce better clinical responses in MM patients.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:433065 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Harrison, Simon James |
| Publisher | University of Glasgow |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://theses.gla.ac.uk/1054/ |
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