GM-CSF-secreting melanoma vaccines

Characterization of the MUC1.Tg/MIN transgenic mouse as a model for studying antigen-specific immunotherapy of adenomas

“…The MHC class I peptides confer MUC1 specificity leading to the induction of CTL-mediated anti-tumor responses; the Hepatitis B core antigen-derived MHC class II pan T helper peptide was included to boost CD8 + anti-tumor responses [30,31]; CpG-ODN was included to promote DC activation via its interaction with Toll-like receptor (TLR)-9 [32,33] to enhance CTL responses, expansion and survival [33][34][35][36][37]. GM-CSF promotes antigen presentation and DC recruitment to vaccine sites [38][39][40][41] and is commonly used as a biological adjuvant in preclinical and clinical immunotherapy studies [42,43]. In separate experiments, groups of MUC1.Tg/MIN and MIN mice were immunized with the peptide-based vaccine (peptides + CpG-ODN + GM-CSF) or the non-peptide-based vaccine (CpG-ODN + GM-CSF) on day 66 when the mice harbored large numbers of adenomas.…”

Dual Role of GM-CSF as a Pro-Inflammatory and a Regulatory Cytokine: Implications for Immune Therapy

“…Since cytokines play a major role in modulating antitumor immune response (Candido and Hagemann 2013), cytokines such as IL-2 (Forni and others 1985;Forni and others 1988) and GM-CSF (Dranoff 2002(Dranoff , 2003 have been used in cancer treatment protocols for eliciting a strong antitumor immune response. In one preclinical study, modified B16 melanoma cells engineered to express GM-CSF elicited a more potent anti-tumor response than the nonexpressing cells in C57BL/6 mice, (Dranoff and others 1993).…”

Adenovirus as vehicle for anticancer genetic immunotherapy

“…It is worth highlighting that in all these studies a significant immunological activity has been reported. [57][58][59][60][61][62] Other group of clinical trials explore the efficacy of GVAX, a GM-CSF gene-modified tumor vaccine. To make this vaccine, autologous tumor biopsies were taken from each patient, processed to a single cell suspension by enzymatic digestion followed by overnight transduction with an E1/E3-deleted adenoviral vector encoding GM-CSF.…”