Investigation into the immunogenicity of dendritic cell-derived exosomes

树突状细胞在免疫反应中是必不可少的。它们具有刺激针对病毒、细菌和癌症的淋巴细胞的独特能力。它们极其罕见，难以分离。我们已经开发出一种培养方法，可以持续供应树突细胞。在我们的培养中产生的细胞也产生高产量的脱细胞膜颗粒，称为“外泌体”，以前很难分离和表征。一些初步报告表明外泌体可以诱导或修饰免疫反应，具有巨大的免疫治疗潜力。由于难以分离出足够的树突状细胞来分离外泌体，因此对其临床应用的进一步研究受到限制。这项研究将涉及从我们独特的小鼠树突状细胞培养系统中产生和表征外泌体。将评估分离的外泌体在癌症、病毒感染和自身免疫等疾病的免疫治疗方面的潜力。

Dendritic cells are essential in immune responses. They have unique capacity to stimulate lymphocytes specific to viruses, bacteria and cancers. They are extremely rare and difficult to isolate. We have developed a method of culture which gives a continuous supply of dendritic cells. Cells produced in our culture also produce a high yield of acellular membranous particles called 'exosomes' which have been previously been very difficult to isolate and characterise. Some preliminary reports suggest that exosomes can induce or modify immune responses and that they have enormous immunotherapeutic potential. Further study of their clinical application is limited by the difficulty of isolating enough dendritic cells from which to isolate exosomes. This study will involve production and characterisation of exosomes from our unique murine dendritic cell culture system. Exosomes isolated will be assessed in terms of potential for immunotherapeutic treatment of disease such as cancer, viral infection and autoimmunity.