A systematic comparison of the immunostimulatory capacity of TLR 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 and 9 agonists and an agonistic CD40-specific antibody was performed in a single long peptide vaccination model. All adjuvants activated DC in vitro but not all induced a strong functional T-cell response in vivo. Optimal clonal CD8(+) T-cell expansion depended on the capacity of agonists to mature pro-inflammatory DC and the duration of their in vivo stimulatory effect. Strong agonists promoted the induction of both antigen-specific IFNgamma-producing CD4(+) T-helper cells and high num...

Clinical outcomes of gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST)-bearing patients treated with imatinib mesylate (IM) are variable. Other than the site of mutation within the c-kit gene, prognostic features of GIST remain undefined. IM can exhibit off-target effects such as triggering natural killer (NK) cell activity. We addressed whether NK cell functions could predict long term survival with IM. NK cell functions were followed up in 77 GIST patients enrolled onto two phase III trials. "Immunologic responders" were defined as patients whose NK cell IFN-gamma values a...

Studies assessing the function of monocyte derived dendritic cells (MD-DC) in individuals with hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection have shown conflicting results. Impaired MD-DC function in chronic HCV infection would have important implications both for understanding the pathogenesis of HCV infection and in the use of autologous MD-DC in vaccination strategies. We determined the allostimulatory capacity of MD-DC in the same patient before and after HCV infection. Next, the phenotype, cytokine production and allostimulatory function of immature and mature MD-DC in ...

CD137 (also known as 4-1BB) is a surface co-stimulatory glycoprotein originally described as present on activated T lymphocytes. Artificial stimulation of this molecule with monoclonal antibodies or other agonist moieties therapeutically augments the cellular immune response against tumors, regardless of the absence of CD137 on tumor cells. These pharmacological agents, when administered systemically, surpass the immune effects of the membrane-bound natural ligand (CD137 or 4-1BB ligand), the activity of which is confined to cell-to-cell interactions. Greater aff...

hMena (ENAH), an actin regulatory protein involved in the control of cell motility and adhesion, is modulated during human breast carcinogenesis. In fact, whereas undetectable in normal mammary epithelium, hMena becomes overexpressed in high-risk benign lesions and primary and metastatic tumors. In vivo, hMena overexpression correlates with the HER-2(+)/ER(-)/Ki67(+) unfavorable prognostic phenotype. In vitro, neuregulin-1 up-regulates whereas Herceptin treatment down-modulates hMena expression, suggesting that it may couple tyrosine kinase receptor signaling to t...

BACKGROUND: Tumor cell contamination of the apheresis in multiple myeloma is likely to affect disease-free and overall survival after autografting. OBJECTIVE: To purge myeloma aphereses from tumor contaminants with a novel culture-based purging method. METHODS: We cultured myeloma-positive CD34+ PB samples in conditions that retained multipotency of hematopoietic stem cells, but were unfavourable to survival of plasma cells. Moreover, we exploited the resistance of myeloma plasma cells to retroviral transduction by targeting the hematopoietic CD34+ cell population...

Apoptotic cell death is initiated by a morphologically homogenous entity that was considered to be non-immunogenic and non-inflammatory in nature. However, recent advances suggest that apoptosis, under certain circumstances, can be immunogenic. In particular, some characteristics of the plasma membrane, acquired at preapoptotic stage, can cause immune effectors to recognize and attack preapoptotic tumor cells. The signals that mediate the immunogenicity of tumor cells involve elements of the DNA damage response (such as ataxia telangiectasia mutated and p53 activ...

The treatment of cancer by chemotherapy causes tumour cell death, mostly by apoptosis. This tumour cell death may or may not elicit an immune response. At least in some cases, the efficacy of chemotherapy critically depends on the induction of immunogenic cell death that is a type of cell demise that stimulates the activation of an adaptative anti-tumour immune response, which in turn helps to eradicate residual cancer (stem) cells. Indeed, anthracyclins care more efficient in curing tumours in immunocompetent than in T cell-deficient mice. The molecular mechanism...

Invariant natural killer T (iNKT) cells are a subset of nonconventional T cells recognizing endogenous and/or exogenous glycolipid antigens in the context of CD1d molecules. It remains unclear whether innate stimuli can modify the profile of endogenous lipids recognized by iNKT cells on the surface of antigen-presenting cells (APCs). We report that activation of human APCs by Toll-like receptor ligands (TLR-L) modulates the lipid biosynthetic pathway, resulting in enhanced recognition of CD1d-associated lipids by iNKT cells, as defined by IFN- secretion. APC-derive...

In response to Toll-like receptor ligands, dendritic cells (DCs) dramatically enhance their antigen presentation capacity by stabilizing at the cell-surface MHC II molecules. We demonstrate here that, in human monocyte-derived DCs, the RING-CH ubiquitin E3 ligase, membrane-associated RING-CH I (MARCH I), promotes the ubiquitination of the HLA-DR beta-chain. Thus, in nonactivated DCs, MARCH I induces the surface internalization of mature HLA-DR complexes, therefore reducing their stability and levels. We further demonstrate that the maturation-dependent down-regul...

In response to inflammatory stimulation, dendritic cells (DCs) have a remarkable pattern of differentiation (maturation) that exhibits specific mechanisms to control immunity. Here, we show that in response to Lipopolysaccharides (LPS), several microRNAs (miRNAs) are regulated in human monocyte-derived dendritic cells. Among these miRNAs, miR-155 is highly up-regulated during maturation. Using LNA silencing combined to microarray technology, we have identified the Toll-like receptor/interleukin-1 (TLR/IL-1) inflammatory pathway as a general target of miR-155. We ...

Erratum in: Eur J Immunol. 2008 May;38(5):1465-6. MHC-peptide-specific Fab antibodies binding to HLA-A*0201 complexes presenting the wild-type EAAGIGILTV (EAA) or analogue Melan-A 10-mer ELAGIGILTV (ELA) peptide were generated to study efficacy of peptide processing and presentation. None of the selected Fab antibodies detected the naturally processed EAA/HLA-A*0201 complex on melanoma tumor cells, confirming the known low peptide number on the cell surface. To study the effect of peptide presentation and processing in more detail, genes coding for the A27L-mu...

An optimal anticancer vaccine probably requires the cooperation of both CD4(+) Th cells and CD8(+) CTLs. A promising tool in cancer immunotherapy is, therefore, the genetic modification of dendritic cells (DCs) by introducing the coding region of a tumor Ag, of which the antigenic peptides will be presented in both HLA class I and class II molecules. This can be achieved by linking the tumor Ag to the HLA class II-targeting sequence of an endosomal or lysosomal protein. In this study we compared the efficiency of the targeting signals of invariant chain, lysosome...

Over the past decade, many efforts have been made to identify MHC class II-restricted epitopes from different tumor-associated Ags. Melan-A/MART-1(26-35) parental or Melan-A/MART-1(26-35(A27L)) analog epitopes have been widely used in melanoma immunotherapy to induce and boost CTL responses, but only one Th epitope is currently known (Melan-A51-73, DRB1*0401 restricted). In this study, we describe two novel Melan-A/MART-1-derived sequences recognized by CD4 T cells from melanoma patients. These epitopes can be mimicked by peptides Melan-A27-40 presented by HLA-DRB...

The critical importance of plasmacytoid dendritic cells (pDCs) in viral infection, autoimmunity, and tolerance has focused major attention on these cells that are rare in blood and immune organs of humans and mice. The recent development of an Flt-3 ligand (FL) culture system of bone marrow cells has led to the simple generation of large numbers of pDCs that resemble their in vivo steady-state counterparts. The FL system has allowed unforeseen insight into the biology of pDCs, and it is assumed that FL is the crucial growth factor for these cells. Surprisingly we ...

Efficient analysis of very large amounts of raw data for peptide identification and protein quantification is a principal challenge in mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics. Here we describe MaxQuant, an integrated suite of algorithms specifically developed for high-resolution, quantitative MS data. Using correlation analysis and graph theory, MaxQuant detects peaks, isotope clusters and stable amino acid isotope-labeled (SILAC) peptide pairs as three-dimensional objects in m/z, elution time and signal intensity space. By integrating multiple mass measurements ...

Mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics has become a powerful technology to map the protein composition of organelles, cell types and tissues. In our department, a large-scale effort to map these proteomes is complemented by the Max-Planck Unified (MAPU) proteome database. MAPU contains several body fluid proteomes; including plasma, urine, and cerebrospinal fluid. Cell lines have been mapped to a depth of several thousand proteins and the red blood cell proteome has also been analyzed in depth. The liver proteome is represented with 3200 proteins. By employing h...

Dendritic cells (DC) are professional antigen-presenting cells of the immune system that play a key role in regulating T cell-based immunity. In vivo, the capacity of DC to activate T cells depends on their ability to migrate to the T cell areas of lymph nodes as well as on their maturation state. Depending on their cytokine-secreting profile, DC are able to skew the immune response in a specific direction. In particular, IL-12p70 producing DC drive T cells towards a T helper 1 type response. A serious disadvantage of current clinical grade ex vivo generated mono...

The MAPU 2.0 database contains proteomes of organelles, tissues and cell types measured by mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics. In contrast to other databases it is meant to contain a limited number of experiments and only those with very high-resolution and -accuracy data. MAPU 2.0 displays the proteomes of organelles, tissues and body fluids or conversely displays the occurrence of proteins of interest in all these proteomes. The new release addresses MS-specific problems including ambiguous peptide-to-protein assignments and it provides insight into genera...

We have previously reported that mouse plasmacytoid dendritic cells (DC) produce high levels of IL-12p70, whereas bone marrow-derived myeloid DC and splenic DC produce substantially lower levels of this cytokine when activated with the TLR-9 ligand CpG. We now show that in response to CpG stimulation, high levels of IL-10 are secreted by macrophages, intermediate levels by myeloid DC, but no detectable IL-10 is secreted by plasmacytoid DC. MyD88-dependent TLR signals (TLR4, 7, 9 ligation), Toll/IL-1 receptor domain-containing adaptor-dependent TLR signals (TLR3, 4...