Primary malignant brain tumors are uniformly fatal with 5 year survival rates <2%. Current surgical and adjuvant treatments are still ineffective at cure. Immunotherapy and tumor vaccination strategies are attractive alternatives to conventional glioma treatment due to the specific targeting ability of immune responses. Peptide-based glioma immunization experiments have had mixed success. Nucleic acid based immunization has not been well studied and potentially offers improved efficacy over peptide-based models. Polysomal RNA from cell lines expressing the ovalbumin tumor antigen will be tested as antigen source in transfected dendritic cell with flow cytometry to confirm phenotypic maturation and allogeneic mixed lymphocyte reaction assay to confirm functional activation. Antigen specificity will be tested by induction of ovalbumin-specific T cell hybridoma production of cytokines after exposure to transfected dendritic cells. Results from these experiments will help characterize the potential use of dendritic cells transfected with polysomal RNA in creating antigen specific tumor vaccines for brain tumors.
| Chi, John H; Panner, Amith; Cachola, Kristine et al. (2008) Increased expression of the glioma-associated antigen ARF4L after loss of the tumor suppressor PTEN. Laboratory investigation. J Neurosurg 108:299-303 |
