Adoptive antifungal T cell immunotherapy--into the clinic?
The morbidity and mortality rates of invasive fungal infection in allogeneic stem cell recipients are still unacceptably high and have not been significantly improved by alternative antifungal strategies to date. Over the last few years, rapid methods for the clinical-scale generation of functionally active and well characterized antifungal T(H)1 cells have become available. In addition, current data on the use of donor-derived virus-specific T cells in allogeneic stem cell transplantation suggest that the risk of severe adverse events, in particular the risk of graft-versus-host disease, is negligible. Therefore, adoptive antifungal immunotherapeutic strategies should be evaluated in clinical trials. However, one has to recognize that these trials are only meaningful with sufficiently large and homogenous cohorts of patients and if the settings of adoptive antifungal immunotherapy are comparable. Ultimately, the strategy of adoptively transferring antifungal immune responses might improve the outcome in hematopoietic stem cell recipients suffering from invasive fungal infection.
Lehrnbecher
Thomas
T
Pediatric Hematology and Oncology, Children's Hospital III, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Theodor-Stern-Kai 7, Frankfurt, Germany. Thomas.Lehrnbecher@kgu.de
Schmidt
Stanislaw
S
Koehl
Ulrike
U
Schuster
Friedhelm R
FR
Uharek
Lutz
L
Klingebiel
Thomas
T
Tramsen
Lars
L
D000818:Animals; D005658:Fungi / Q000472:pathogenicity; D018380:Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation / Q000009:adverse effects*; D006801:Humans; D016219:Immunotherapy, Adoptive / Q000379:methods*; D009181:Mycoses / Q000382:microbiology / Q000628:therapy*; D011183:Postoperative Complications / Q000382:microbiology / Q000628:therapy*; D013601:T-Lymphocytes / Q000276:immunology*; D014184:Transplantation, Homologous / Q000009:adverse effects