Specific immunotherapy for cervical cancer by using human papillomavirus protein and dendritic cells

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Cervical cancer is one of the most common causes of cancer-related death in women. As a result of several recent advantages in molecular biology, Human papillomavirus (HPV) is present in virtually all cervical cancers, an estimated 99.7 percent.. The E6 and E7 genes of HPV-l6 encode for oncoproteins that can immortalize human keratinocytes. Continued expression of the E6 and E7 proteins has been shown to be necessary for the growth and tumorigenicity of cervical carcinoma cells. Therefore they are attractive targets for the immunotherapy. But several studies have shown that peptides alone are not very efficient in inducing cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL) responses both in vitro and in vivo, and that immune adjuvants may play an important role. Among adjuvants, dendritic cells (DC) appear to play a critical role on antigen presentation in vivo and initiate immune responses. In this study, autologous DC co-cultured with a recombinant HPV-16 E6/E7 fusion protein could successfully induce specific CTL.This result suggests that DC may be capable of engulfing extracellular viral protein, which can then undergo intracellular processing in the class I pathway to permit the peptide fragments to become available for CTL.