期刊名称:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN:0027-8424
电子版ISSN:1091-6490
出版年度:1998
卷号:95
期号:22
页码:13147-13152
DOI:10.1073/pnas.95.22.13147
语种:English
出版社:The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要:Dendritic cells (DCs) instruct and activate a naive immune system to mount a response toward foreign proteins. Therefore, it has been hypothesized that an ideal vaccine strategy would be to directly introduce genes encoding antigens into DCs. To test this strategy quantitatively, we have compared the immune response elicited by a genetically transfected DC line to that induced by a fibroblast line, or standard genetic immunization. We observe that a single injection of 500-1,000 transfected DCs can produce a response comparable to that of standard genetic immunization, whereas fibroblasts, with up to 50-fold greater transfection efficiency, were less potent. We conclude that transfection of a small number of DCs is sufficient to initiate a wide variety of immune responses. These results indicate that targeting genes to DCs will be important for controlling and augmenting the immunological outcome in genetic immunization.