Hemavathi Dhandapani
India, ranking number one globally in terms of cervical cancer burden, has an estimated 134,420 new cases of cervical cancer every year and 72,825 deaths occur due to this disease. These necessitate an emergence of novel adjuvant immunotherapeutic strategies to trigger a potent antitumour response. Dendritic cells (DCs) are one such immune cell that triggers both adaptive and innate immune cells which result in tumour suppression or regression. Our study showed the presence of tumour lysate as the antigen source increased the maturation marker with the significant migratory capacity of tumour lysate primed DCs (TLDCs) towards the gradient of chemokine ligands. The functionality of TLDCs was also improved in stimulating Th1 response with a significant rise in IL12 and IFNγ in autologous co-cultures. Also, our study for the first time showed the possibility of generating the sperm associated antigen 9 (SPAG9) primed DCs invitro with 750ng of SPAG9 as the optimised dosage for priming. The phenotypic and functional assays also imply the SPAG9 primed DCs in producing a comparable immune response to TLDCs. Further, the intervention of chemotherapeutic regimen-cisplatin on TLDCs and SPAG9 primed DCs did not hamper the phenotypic as well as the functionality of DCs at the 200µM concentration (equivalent to the clinical dose). In conclusion, our study standardised and set up the quality control criteria for DC vaccine which acts as the potential therapeutic vaccine treatment along with the standard chemotherapeutic agent cisplatin for the ongoing phase II clinical trial in cervical cancer.