BACKGROUND Highly pathogenic influenza A/H5N1 has caused outbreaks in wild birds and poultry in Asia, Africa and Europe. It has also infected people, especially children, causing severe illness and death. Although the virus shows limited ability to transmit between humans, A/H5N1 represents a potential source of the next influenza pandemic. This study assesses the safety and immunogenicity of a...

Advanced melanoma is an aggressive form of skin cancer characterized by low survival rates. Less than 50% advanced patients respond to current therapies, and those that do respond, many present with tumor recurrence due resistance. The immunosuppressive tumor-immune microenvironment (TIME) remains a major obstacle in therapy. Adjuvant treatment modalities enhance anti-tumor immune cell function...

There is ample evidence that neoadjuvant chemotherapy of breast carcinoma is particularly efficient if the tumor presents signs of either a pre-existent or therapy-induced anticancer immune response. Antineoplastic chemotherapies are particularly beneficial if they succeed in inducing immunogenic cell death, hence converting the tumor into its own therapeutic vaccine. Immunogenic cell death is ...

Early events responsible of tumor growth in patients with a normal immune system are poorly understood. Here, we discuss, in the context of human melanoma, the Prehn hypothesis according to which a weak antitumor immune response may be required for tumor growth before weakly or non-immunogenic tumor cell subpopulations are selected by the immune system.

Mice with the CBA/N defect are unresponsive to the hapten phosphorylcholine (PC) even when presented on a variety of immunogenic carriers. Since these mice have the variable region gene for PC, their inability to respond may reflect deletion or suppression of the line of B lymphocytes which is responsible for the anti-PC response.

Retrospective clinical data indicate that cardiac glycosides (CGs), notably digoxin, prolong the survival of carcinoma patients treated with conventional chemotherapy. CGs are known to influence the immune response at multiple levels. In addition, recent results suggest that CGs trigger the immunogenic demise of cancer cells, an effect that most likely contributes to their clinical anticancer a...

Radiotherapy is an important therapeutic option for the treatment of cancer. Growing evidence indicates that, besides inducing an irreversible DNA damage, radiotherapy promotes tumor-specific immune response, which significantly contribute to therapeutic efficacy. We postulate that radiotherapy activates tumor-associated dendritic cells, thus changing the tolerogenic tumor environment into an i...

The efficacy of antineoplastic chemotherapies with anthracyclines or oxaliplatin relies on the induction of immunogenic cell death, thus provoking an anticancer immune response. Recently, we observed that overexpression of CD39, an ATP-degrading enzyme expressed on the cell surface, abolishes the immunogenicity of cell death, thus rendering cancers resistant against chemotherapy.

The available evidence suggests that protective immunity to Leishmania is achieved by priming the CD4(+) Th1 response. Therefore, we utilised a reverse genetics strategy to generate influenza A viruses to deliver an immunogenic Leishmania peptide. The single, immunodominant Leishmania-specific LACK(158-173) CD4(+) peptide was engineered into the neuraminidase stalk of H1N1 and H3N2 influenza A ...