title: Artificial antigen-presenting cells: artificial solutions for real diseases.
abstract: Adoptive immunotherapy, which involves the transfer of autologous antigen-specific T cells generated ex vivo, is a promising strategy to treat a variety of life-threatening diseases. Unfortunately, current approaches for generating sufficient numbers of antigen-specific T cells lack the ability to serve as reproducible and economically viable methods. This has spurred the development of both cell- and non-cell-based artificial antigen-presenting cells to alleviate problems associated with peptide-loaded dendritic cells in current approaches to adoptive immunotherapy. Here, we review new strategies for the ex vivo generation of antigen-specific T cells and their clinical application. These new approaches have the potential to spearhead a new era of successful adoptive immunotherapy for cancer and infectious diseases.
authors.affiliation: Department of Pathology and Medicine, The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA. moelke1@jhmi.edu
authors.forename: Mathias
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Oelke
authors.forename: Christine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Krueger
authors.forename: Robert L
authors.initials: RL
authors.lastname: Giuntoli
authors.forename: Jonathan P
authors.initials: JP
authors.lastname: Schneck
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D000938:Antigen-Presenting Cells / Q000276:immunology*; D006801:Humans; D007167:Immunotherapy / Q000379:methods* / Q000639:trends; D013601:T-Lymphocytes / Q000276:immunology / Q000378:metabolism