The advances in understanding of DC biology and function led to the development of anticancer DC vaccine concepts [3]. For this purpose, the DC are most commonly generated ex vivo from patient’s monocytes [4], matured and loaded with tumour-specific antigens before injecting them back into the patient’s body. The basic idea of this approach is that the DC will migrate to secondary lymphoid organs and induce an immune response towards the tumour. Even though some promising check details results have been obtained in multiple clinical trials with different cancer types [5], this approach still needs improvement.

Renal transplant recipients (RTR) have a high risk of tumour development, especially cutaneous squamous cell carcinomas (SCC), due to long-term immunosuppressive therapy [6, 7].

The problem of SCC in RTR is the selleck chemical high risk of developing multiple lesions. These lesions often develop at anatomical sites where surgical excision with primary closure is not straightforward. In a subgroup of these patients, this gives rise to an increased morbidity and mortality due to more aggressive SCC with a higher risk of local recurrence and metastasis [8-12]. Thus, management of patients with a high tumour burden is challenging and often requires a multidisciplinary approach [13]. Therefore, new therapeutic approaches such as immunotherapy are required. One possible from explanation for the increased risk of SCC might be impaired immune surveillance in RTR due to a reduction in DC subsets in blood [14-17] and in skin [18]. The immunosuppressive drugs affect not only T lymphocytes, but have also an effect on differentiation and maturation of DC, indicated by lower numbers and functional deficits of various circulating DC populations in immunosuppressed patients [17, 19-22]. It is less clear, however, if it is possible to generate fully functional monocyte-derived dendritic cells (moDC) from these patients

as there exist inconsistent reports on this issue [20, 23]. To evaluate the possible use of a moDC-based vaccination strategy for the treatment of SCC in immunosuppressed patients, we here analysed the phenotype and cytokine profile of moDC from long-term immunosuppressed patients. The Norwegian Renal Registry was used to identify RTR living in Hordaland County in western Norway as described elsewhere [17]. The baseline characteristics of the patients and controls are summarized in Table 1. The study was performed according to the Declaration of Helsinki and was approved by the Regional Committee for Research Ethics (176.08) and the Data Inspectorate.