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.

  • Author’s View
  • Published:

Spotlight—author’s view for “Metabolic glycan labeling immobilizes dendritic cell membrane and enhances antitumorefficacy of dendritic cell vaccine”

Genes & Immunity (2023)Cite this article

Subjects

Dendritic cell (DC), as the prominent type of antigen presenting cells in the body, has been the main target of intervention for developing therapeutic cancer vaccines. Indeed, Sipuleucel-T, a type of DC vaccine, was among the first FDA-approved cancer immunotherapy (approved for prostate cancer treatment in 2010) [1]. However, the therapeutic benefit of Sipuleucel-T is modest, with a 4.1-month improvement in median survival. The past decade has witnessed extensive attempts to improve the therapeutic efficacy of DC vaccines while maintaining the favorable safety profile. Various other types of therapeutic vaccines, including nanovaccines, tumor exosome vaccine, mRNA vaccines, DNA vaccines, and biomaterial scaffold vaccines have also been developed [2, 3]. However, despite the significant progress in preclinical settings, Sipuleucel-T remains the only FDA-approved therapeutic cancer vaccine to date.

Surprisingly, the authors found that metabolic glycan labeling itself is able to activate DCs, as evidenced by the upregulated expression of surface activation markers including CD86, MHCII, CD40, and CCR7 [5]. The gene expression profile and cytokine secretion profile of Ac4ManNAz-treated DCs also exhibit radical changes in comparison with untreated DCs. One plausible mechanism the authors suggested is the alteration of membrane physics caused by the installation of unnatural sugars on the cell membrane. By transfecting DCs with two types of fluorescently tagged membrane proteins, ICAM1-GFP and YFP-Mem, and performing the fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP) assay, it was shown that Ac4ManNAz-treated DCs exhibited a reduced membrane mobility than untreated DCs. The reduced membrane mobility could lead to changes in receptor clustering and downstream activation pathways, as a potential mechanism underlying the activation of DCs. Following tumor studies demonstrated the enhanced CD8+ T cell response and therapeutic efficacy of azido-labeled DC vaccines.

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

Fig. 1: Azido-sugars can be metabolized by DCs and become expressed on the cell membrane in the form of glycoproteins and glycolipids, which itself improves the activation status and antigen presentation ability of DCs.

References

  1. Kantoff PW, Higano CS, Shore ND, Berger ER, Small EJ, Penson DF, et al. Sipuleucel-T immunotherapy for castration-resistant prostate cancer. N. Engl J Med. 2010;363:411–22.

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  2. Wang H, Mooney DJ. Biomaterial-assisted targeted modulation of immune cells in cancer treatment. Nat Mater. 2018;17:761–72. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-018-0147-9.

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  3. Irvine DJ, Dane EL. Enhancing cancer immunotherapy with nanomedicine. Nat Rev Immunol. 2020;20:321–34.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  CAS  Google Scholar 

  4. Perez CR, De Palma M. Engineering dendritic cell vaccines to improve cancer immunotherapy. Nat Commun. 2019;10:5408.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  5. Han J, Bhatta R, Liu Y, Bo Y, Elosegui-Artola A, Wang H. Metabolic glycan labeling immobilizes dendritic cell membrane and enhances antitumor efficacy of dendritic cell vaccine. Nat Commun. 2023;14:5049. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-40886-7.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  CAS  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support from NSF DMR 2143673 CAR (HW), R01CA274738 (HW), R21CA270872 (HW), and the start-up package from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Cancer Center at Illinois.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA

    Jiadiao Zhou & Hua Wang

  2. Cancer Center at Illinois (CCIL), Urbana, IL, 61801, USA

    Hua Wang

  3. Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA

    Hua Wang

  4. Department of Bioengineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA

    Hua Wang

  5. Carle College of Medicine, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA

    Hua Wang

  6. Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA

    Hua Wang

  7. Materials Research Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA

    Hua Wang

Authors
  1. Jiadiao Zhou
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Hua Wang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

JZ wrote the initial draft of the manuscript. HW revised the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hua Wang.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Zhou, J., Wang, H. Spotlight—author’s view for “Metabolic glycan labeling immobilizes dendritic cell membrane and enhances antitumorefficacy of dendritic cell vaccine”. Genes Immun (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41435-023-00245-4

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41435-023-00245-4

Search

Advanced search

Quick links