Background: Adoptive immune and vaccine therapies have been used to prevent cytomegalovirus (CMV) disease in recipients of hematopoietic progenitor cell transplants, but the nature of T cell responses to CMV have not been completely characterized.

Dendritic cells (DC) are important adjuvants for cancer vaccines. Immature dendritic cells (iDCs) are often produced by the stimulation of peripheral blood monocytes with IL-4 and GM-CSF. For many applications iDCs are treatment with cytokines or inflammatory signals to produce mature DCs (mDCs). Immature DCs are often treated ex-vivo with LPS and IFN-γ to produce mature DCs for clinical therapy. The purpose of this study was to determine if the DC maturation cocktail LPS plus IFN-γ could be improved by the addition of two other DC maturation agents IL-1β and TNF-α. Peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) were collected from 6 healthy subjects. Monocytes were isolated from the PBMC concentrates by elutriation and were incubated for 3 days with GM-CSF and IL-4 to produce iDCs. Immature DCs from each subject were divided into 3 and were incubated for 24 hours with LPS plus IFN-γ; LPS, IFN-γ plus IL-1β; or LPS, IFN-γ, IL-1β plus TNF-α to produce mDCs. The DCs were compared by measuring the expression of co-stimulator and antigen presenting molecules (CD80, CD83, CD86, and HLA-DR) by flow cytometry, cytokine production (IL-12p70 and IL-10) by ELISA and global gene expression using an oligonucleotide microarray. There were no differences in the expression of co-stimulatory molecules, HLA-DR and CCR7 and production of IL-12p70 among the mDCs produced with the 3 cocktails. Global gene expression analysis found that the expression of 9,576 genes differed between the iDCs and mDCs, but the expression of only 13 differed among the 3 different groups of mDCs. There was no benefit of adding IL-1β and TNF-α to LPS and IFN-γ to order to produce mDCs.

Background: The culture and expansion of human cells for clinical use requires the presence of human serum or plasma in culture media. Although these supplements have been extensively characterized in their chemical composition, only recently it has been possible to provide by high throughput protein analysis, a comprehensive profile of the soluble factors contributing to cell survival. This study analyzed and compared the presence of 100 proteins including chemokines, cytokines and soluble factors in six different types of media supplements: serum, plasma, recalcified plasma, heat inactivated serum, heat inactivated plasma and heat inactivated recalcified plasma.

Background: Since the V617F mutation in JAK2 may not be the initiating event in myeloprofilerative disorders (MPDs) we compared molecular changes in neutrophils from patients with polycythemia vera (PV) and essential thrombocythosis (ET), to neutrophils stimulated by G-CSF administration and to normal unstimulated neutrophils

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