# Dendritic Cell Therapy in Immuno-Oncology: A Potentially Key Component of Anti-Cancer Immunotherapies

## TL;DR

This paper reviews the potential of dendritic cell therapy as a key part of cancer immunotherapy, highlighting its safety and clinical promise despite challenges in standardization.

## Contribution

The paper provides an updated review of dendritic cell-based immunotherapy, emphasizing the need for standardization to enable broader clinical adoption.

## Key findings

- Dendritic cell therapy is a safe and promising approach in cancer immunotherapy.
- Clinical trial results are difficult to evaluate due to variability in trial designs and patient cohorts.
- Standardization of dendritic cell methodologies is urgently needed for routine clinical use.

## Abstract

The limited efficacy and severe side effects of traditional anti-tumor therapies prompted a paradigm shift in practical oncology in the past decade. This includes innovative approaches like cancer immunotherapy that aims to exploit the anti-cancer capacity of the innate immune system. Accordingly, numerous new concepts of immune oncology have been developed in recent years, including the use of immune checkpoint inhibitors or genetically engineered T lymphocytes. However, the observed variable clinical effectiveness calls for further developments like those that rely on dendritic cells, master regulators of lymphocyte activation through antigen presentation. Here, we review these efforts, including the ongoing clinical trials and potential future directions of the use of them in clinical practice.

Dendritic cells (DCs) are a heterogeneous population known for antigen presentation and immune modulation, playing a key role in priming a T cell response against pathogens and tumor cells. Despite their putative therapeutic value, their scarcity in peripheral blood limited their direct use in therapeutic applications until recently. The discovery that DCs can be generated from circulating monocytes ex vivo, however, gave a boost of extensive research in the use of DCs in clinical applications. Still, despite the numerous clinical trials, the introduction of DCs in the everyday clinical oncology practice is delayed. In this narrative review, we provide an updated summary of the field covering the theoretical and practical aspects of the concept of the use of DCs in adoptive cellular immunotherapy and the completed or ongoing clinical trials for the use of these species in clinical oncology practice. To better understand the current developments of the field, we included those clinical trial reports that published evaluable data to date. Based on our literature survey, DC-based adoptive cellular therapy is a safe therapeutic intervention with valuable clinical potential. Its widespread implementation, however, is likely delayed due to a number of factors that make meaningful evaluation of clinical trial results complicated. These include the great variety of preclinical trial concepts, difficult and heterogenous patient cohorts, and the diversity of intervention techniques applied. Since these factors might hinder the routine implementation of DC-based applications in the more widespread forms of immunotherapy, one of the urgent short-term future directions seems to be the standardization of the DC-based methodologies.