Dendritic cell vaccines for cancer therapy

Dendritic cells (DC) are professional antigen-presenting cells whose primar y function is the initiation of immune response. Based on the finding that the immune system usually fails to identify and kill cancer cells, DC have been recently used as vaccines for stimulation of tumour-specific immunity. This review focuses on pitfalls related to DC-based vaccination against so lid tumours and on improvement of this immunotherapeutic approach for routi ne treatment of cancer disease. (C) 2001 Harcourt Publishers Ltd.