Is it a plane? Is it a bird? NO, its Dendritic Cells coming to save us!

There is a lot going on in the world today. To not be writing about the coronavirus would seem crazy since every aspect of our lives have been impacted by COVID-19. But, that does not mean that the severity of many other diseases and illnesses should not be the focus for many doctors and scientists. There are still many people dealing with HIV and cancer and the presence of COVID-19 for them only makes their situation much worse. For any person that is considered as immunocompromised, the likelihood of facing severe symptoms from the coronavirus or from any illness they are currently fighting will only lead to life or death situations for them. With the presence of dendritic cells and the way we can incorporate them into vaccines or other therapy treatments may help in finding cures to illnesses that have been so difficult to treat.

From an article titled, “Dendritic Cell Vaccines for Cancer Immunotherapy: The Role of Human Conventional Type 1 Dendritic Cells“, the authors look to see how conventional type 1 Dendritic Cells play a role in cancer immunotherapy. From their conclusions they were able to find that the use of dendritic cells can lead to very promising vaccines that can be used with other therapies used to treat cancer. The vaccines would work to allow for antigen targeting so that dendritic cells are enhanced in terms of function. Researchers state, “ex vivo differentiation from CD34⁺ hematopoietic progenitors and from iPSCs, or the direct reprogramming of somatic cells, followed by antigen loading and administration; direct antigen targeting in endogenous cDC1; and strategies aiming to enhance their frequency and functions in tumors”. From this, I believe that this could be a great way to treat tumor cells since this would allow for the dendritic cells to be more precise in their attack of the cancer. As it was also stated in the article, this is only the beginning in terms of research of DC cells, but in my opinion, there seems to be a lot of promise that can lead to more results that shows the destruction of these cancerous cells.

Another article focuses more on the response of dendritic cells toward HIV. In the article, “Dendritic Cells, the Double Agent in the War Against HIV-1“, researchers look to study what is being exactly done about this. From their concluding remarks, they find that more research needs to be done with regards to how DC’s function and how they would specifically target HIV. But, they do mention that this is one of the most promising types of molecule that could aid in developing in a vaccine. In my opinion, the focus, as mentioned in the article, should be on the ability for APC’s to present specific proteins of the HIV and allow this for much more efficient recognition and attack by DC. By doing this, it would allow for DC’s to fight the HIV and hopefully a vaccine that could be produced could allow for maturation of DC’s and change that intracellular pathway that HIV takes to avoid some key defense systems. Downsides with these types of treatments it that it seems that they would be quite expensive and present side effects that have not been determined yet. But from this, I believe that we will be able to fight off diseases caused by COVID-19 or other pathogens because we will have better knowledge of how dendritic cells function.