A vaccination trial with RNA transfected autologous DC was done with overlapping peptides covering the whole protein sequence of the tumor antigens MageA3, MelanA and Survivin.

These autologous dendritic cells were used for vaccine production. They were pulsed with apoptotic autologous ovarian carcinoma cells.

The autologous DC loaded with KLH, as immunological tracer, and an allogeneic peptidome (i.e. natural tumour peptides, NTPs), obtained from melanoma cell line SK-Mel24, are used for vaccination.

These cells were used to produce a vaccine for prostate carcinoma and were pulsed with apoptotic allogenic prostate carcinoma cell line LNCap cells.

We evaluated the capacity of autologous DC and HEK293 cells transfected with relevant HLA alleles to function as T cell targets in Elispot assays upon transfection with tumor antigen encoding plasmids. Due to strong background from the autologous DC we decided that HEK293 transfected with one HLA-allele at a time plus simultaneously transfected with up to 5 tumor antiges would be optimal to screen for antigen specificity in the patients T cells. However, during a second T cell culture to expand large numbers of T cells for this screening procedure a drastic ex...