Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Research News and Views
  • Published:

Extending genetic vaccines with chemokines

Nature Biotechnology volume 17, pages 226–227 (1999)Cite this article

A longstanding problem in cancer vaccine research has been the poor immunogenicity of "self" tumor antigens. As a result, protein-based cancer vaccines often have proved ineffective at inducing antitumor responses, possibly because of their inability to stimulate autoreactive T cells subject to immune suppression. In this issue, Larry Kwak and colleagues1 describe a DNA vaccine approach capable of triggering both the humoral and cellular arms of the immune response. By fusing a nonimmunogenic immunoglobulin (Ig) variable region (sFv) to chemotactic cytokines (or chemokines), they were able to protect syngeneic mice against an otherwise lethal B-cell lymphoma. Their data suggest that physical linkage of an antigen to a chemokine may be an effective strategy for eliciting both CD4 and CD8 T cell responses against tumor antigens.

Years ago, Karl Landsteiner first recognized that antibody responses could be elicited against nonimmunogenic molecules, called haptens, when they were covalently linked to an immunogenic "carrier" protein. This so-called hapten-carrier effect is now known to reflect the need for interactions between more than one cell type to generate antigen-specific antibodies of moderate to high affinity. Nevertheless, long before it was recognized that T cells, B cells, and other antigen-presenting cells (APCs) were necessary for the immune response to antigen, immunologists took advantage of the hapten-carrier effect to generate useful antibodies specific for a wide assortment of nonimmunogenic proteins or small molecules, such as drugs or toxins.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on Springer Link
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Figure 1: Hypothetical model depicting how a chemokine-antigen may interact with an antigen-presenting cell (APC).

References

  1. Biragyn, A., Tani, K., Grimm, M.C., Weeks, S. & Kwak, L.W. Nat. Biotechnol. 17, 253– 258 (1999).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  2. King, C.A. et al. Nat. Med. 4, 1281–1286 ( 1998).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  3. Tao, M.-H. & Levy, R. Nature 362, 755–758 (1993).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  4. Rollins, B.J. Blood 90, 909–928 ( 1997).

    CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  5. Luster, A.D. N. Engl. J. Med. 338, 436–445 (1998).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  6. Wu, Y. & Kipps, T.J. J. Immunol. 159, 6037–6043 (1997).

    CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. professor, Department of Medicine, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, 92093, CA

    Thomas Kipps

  2. postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Medicine, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, 92093, CA

    Robert Mendoza

Authors
  1. Thomas Kipps
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Robert Mendoza
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Kipps, T., Mendoza, R. Extending genetic vaccines with chemokines. Nat Biotechnol 17, 226–227 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/6964

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/6964

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing