Endoplasmic Reticulum-Associated Degradation-Dependent Processing in Cross-Presentation and Its Potential for Dendritic Cell Vaccinations: A Review

The role of dendritic cells in cancer immunity and therapeutic strategies

Dendritic cells (DCs) are asserted as the most potent antigen-presenting cells (APCs) that orchestrate both innate and adaptive immunity, being extremely effective in the induction of robust anti-cancer T cell responses. Hence, the modulation of DCs function represents an attractive target for improving cancer immunotherapy efficacy. A better understanding of the immunobiology of DCs, the interaction among DCs, immune effector cells and tumor cells in tumor microenvironment (TME) and the latest advances in biomedical engineering technology would be required for the design of optimal DC-based immunotherapy. In this review, we focus on elaborating the immunobiology of DCs in healthy and cancer environments, the recent advances in the development of enhancing endogenous DCs immunocompetence via immunomodulators as well as DC-based vaccines. The rapidly developing field of applying nanotechnology to improve DC-based immunotherapy is also highlighted.

Targeting ubiquitin signaling for cancer immunotherapy

Cancer immunotherapy has become an attractive approach of cancer treatment with tremendous success in treating various advanced malignancies. The development and clinical application of immune checkpoint inhibitors represent one of the most extraordinary accomplishments in cancer immunotherapy. In addition, considerable progress is being made in understanding the mechanism of antitumor immunity and characterizing novel targets for developing additional therapeutic approaches. One active area of investigation is protein ubiquitination, a post-translational mechanism of protein modification that regulates the function of diverse immune cells in antitumor immunity. Accumulating studies suggest that E3 ubiquitin ligases and deubiquitinases form a family of potential targets to be exploited for enhancing antitumor immunity in cancer immunotherapy.

Heat shock protein 5 and inflammatory bowel disease

Inflammatory bowel disease is a kind of chronic recurrent intestinal inflammatory disease whose occurrence and development are affected by the integrity of the mucosal barrier. As the main component of the mucosal barrier, intestinal epithelial cells mainly include Paneth cells, goblet cells, etc. Heat shock protein 5 is a key factor for endoplasmic reticulum stress, and it affects the survival and apoptosis of intestinal epithelial cells mainly through endoplasmic reticulum stress pathways, and then participates in the process of inflammatory bowel disease.