Specific cellular immunotherapy of renal cell carcinoma. Current status and prospects

: Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is susceptible to immunomodulating therapies. This is proven by clinical responses to unspecific immunotherapy with cytokines. Understanding the mechanisms of antigen presentation and recognition by T cells enables us to expand T-cell clones which are capable of recognizing specific tumor-associated antigens (TAA). The use of dendritic cells (DC) in specific cellular immunotherapy could be beneficial because of their outstanding properties in antigen presentation and T-cell costimulation. In order to circumvent the escape of some tumor cells under T-cell pressure, polyvalent vaccination strategies should be developed. This goal can be achieved by either pulsing respective transfecting DC with tumor cell lysates, RNA or DNA libraries, or a pool of peptide antigens. Careful monitoring of the elicited T-cell response and quality assurance (GMP and GCP) are mandatory to establish a rationale for specific immunotherapy against RCC and to bring it from the bench to the bedside.