Tumor lysate-based vaccines: on the road to immunotherapy for gallbladder cancer

© 2018, The Author(s). Immunotherapy based on checkpoint blockers has proven survival benefits in patients with melanoma and other malignancies. Nevertheless, a significant proportion of treated patients remains refractory, suggesting that in combination with active immunizations, such as cancer vaccines, they could be helpful to improve response rates. During the last decade, we have used dendritic cell (DC) based vaccines where DCs loaded with an allogeneic heat-conditioned melanoma cell lysate were tested in a series of clinical trials. In these studies, 60% of stage IV melanoma DC-treated patients showed immunological responses correlating with improved survival. Further studies showed that an essential part of the clinical efficacy was associated with the use of conditioned lysates. Gallbladder cancer (GBC) is a high-incidence malignancy in South America. Here, we evaluated the feasibility of producing effective DCs using heat-conditioned cell lysates derived from gallbladder can