Dendritic cell vaccine technology transfer and validation as a platform to develop new cancer immunotherapies

Glioblastoma (GBM) is a type of brain cancer with no known cure. Recently, an innovative vaccine combining a patient’s own dendritic cells (DCs) with proteins from allogeneic tumor cells, developed at the Mayo Clinic, showed great promise in early clinical trials. This therapy involves collecting a patient’s dendritic cells, preparing tumor proteins as antigens, and delivering the activated dendritic cells back to the patient. The research team has successfully created platform technology for this GBM therapy using an advanced cell culture technique. Building on this success, the team now aims to develop antigen libraries for other tumor types, expanding their portfolio of cancer vaccines to treat a broader range of cancers and make these therapies more readily available to patients.