Tumor antigens that might serve as potential targets for adoptive T-cell therapy have been defined in different tumor entities, especially in malignant melanoma. To generate conditions to induce primary T-cell responses against different HLA-A*0201-restricted melanoma peptides and to allow further expansion of peptide-specific T cells for adoptive transfer, CD8+-purified T cells from healthy do...

OBJECTIVE This report presents the development, plan, and operation of the National Survey of Adoptive Parents (NSAP), a module of the State and Local Area Integrated Telephone Survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics. NSAP was designed to produce national estimates of the characteristics, health, and well-being of adopted childr...

OBJECTIVE This report presents the development, plan, and operation of the National Survey of Adoptive Parents of Children with Special Health Care Needs (NSAP-SN), a module of the State and Local Area Integrated Telephone Survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics. The survey was designed to produce national estimates of the chara...

There is much promise in the use of immunotherapy for the treatment of cancer. Approaches such as those using antibodies or adoptive cell transfer can mediate complete tumor regression in a proportion of patients. However, the tumor microenvironment can inhibit immune responses leading to ineffective or suboptimal responses of tumors to immunotherapy in the majority of cases. As our knowledge o...

Regulatory CD4(+)CD25(+)Foxp3(+) T cells play a critical role in controlling autoimmunity and T cell homeostasis. However, their role in regulation of lymphopenia-induced proliferation (LIP), a potential mechanism for generation of autoaggressive T cells, has been poorly defined. Currently, two forms of LIP are recognized: spontaneous and homeostatic. Spontaneous LIP is characterized by fast, b...

In the past decade, significant progresses have taken place in the field of cancer immunotherapeutics, which are being developed for most human cancers. New immunotherapeutics, such as Ipilimumab (anti-CTLA-4), have been approved for clinical treatment; cell-based immunotherapies such as adoptive cell transfer (ACT) have either passed the final stage of human studies (e.g., Sipuleucel-T) for th...

Background CD4 T cells are critical mediators of anti-tumor immunity and orchestrate a broad range of immune responses against cancer. Previous studies from our lab and others have demonstrated that, adoptive transfer of tumor specific CD4 T cells to lymphopenic hosts led to eradication of established tumors in mice models. Accumulating evidence from preclinical and clinical studies also sugges...

One mechanism to control immune responses following infection is to rapidly down-regulate Ag presentation, which has been observed in acute viral and bacterial infections. In this study, we describe experiments designed to address whether Ag presentation is decreased after an initial response to Leishmania major. Naive alphabeta-Leishmania-specific (ABLE) TCR transgenic T cells were adoptively ...

Introduction Our laboratory has previously demonstrated that adoptive cell transfer (ACT) of melanoma-specific memory T cells (TM) results in a more potent local and systemic T cell response than ACT with melanoma-specific effector T cells (TE). However, we have also seen that TM are not more cytotoxic than TEin vitro. We hypothesized that a combination of TE+M ACT would have an additive effect...