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。它们有独特的能力刺激针对病毒、细菌和癌症的淋巴细胞。它们极其罕见，很难分离出来。我们已经开发了一种培养方法，可以提供持续的树突状细胞。在我们的培养中产生的细胞还能产生高产量的无细胞膜颗粒，称为‘外体’，以前很难分离和表征这种颗粒。一些初步报告表明，外切体可以诱导或改变免疫反应，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切体，限制了对其临床应用的进一步研究。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生产和鉴定外切体。分离出的外切体将被评估用于癌症、病毒感染和自身免疫等疾病的免疫治疗的可能性。

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.