Therapeutic Immunization with Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 (HIV-1) Peptide-Loaded Dendritic Cells Is Safe and Induces Immunogenicity in HIV-1-Infected Individuals

Dendritic cell based vaccines for HIV infection

“…The 13 clinical trials published so far suggest that DC immunotherapy in HIV-1 infection can elicit HIV-1 specific immunological responses. However, only five of these studies reported virological responses to immunization, 44,45,51,52,55 three have not assessed virological responses 47,50,53 and five failed to show any response. 43,46,48,49,54 Recently, our group reported the results of a blinded placebo controlled trial of a therapeutic vaccine using autologous MD-DC pulsed with autologous heatinactivated whole HIV.…”

“…11,37,38 Some studies in animal models suggest that animals immunized with DCs loaded with HIV-1 viral lysate, envelope glycoproteins or inactivated virus mount a potent immune response against HIV-1. [39][40][41]42 Although it has been performed at least 13 published clinical trials of DC-based immunotherapy for HIV infection in humans [43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50]55 (reviewed in ref. 9), most of them were non-controlled, nonrandomized studies.…”

Dendritic cells primed with a chimeric plasmid containing HIV‐1‐ gag associated with lysosomal‐associated protein‐1 (LAMP/ gag ) is a potential therapeutic vaccine against HIV

“…Also, the use of autologous DCs as vaccine vectors may surpass the adverse effects of preexisting immunity to commonly investigated viral vectors. DC-based vaccines containing different antigens have been investigated, with promising effects, and they seem to be well tolerated in vivo (27,40,51). Still, several questions regarding the best immunogen to include in the formulations, the inoculation route, adjuvants, and timing, among other factors, remain ill defined.…”

HIV Vaccine

“…The objective of this strategy is to stimulate the immune response by enhancing antigen presentation mediated by dendritic cells. An overview of the works conducted so far ( Table 4) shows although that the products are always safe and the results are quite heterogeneous (Kundu et al, 1998;García et al, 2005García et al, , 2011Ide at al., 2006;Connolly et al, 2008, Lu et al, 2004, Ghandhi, 2009 Considering the difficulty to obtain an HIV prophylactic vaccine, the immunotherapy offers a unique opportunity to study the mechanisms of immune response against the virus and contribute to the definition of correlates of protection in HIV infection. Knowledge generated from studies of DC-based immunotherapy may contribute also to the development of prophylactic vaccines.…”