articlePLoS ONEJan 18, 2012GOLD OA

Membrane-Bound IL-21 Promotes Sustained Ex Vivo Proliferation of Human Natural Killer Cells

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center · The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston

PubMed
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Abstract

NK cells have therapeutic potential for a wide variety of human malignancies. However, because NK cells expand poorly in vitro, have limited life spans in vivo, and represent a small fraction of peripheral white blood cells, obtaining sufficient cell numbers is the major obstacle for NK-cell immunotherapy. Genetically-engineered artificial antigen-presenting cells (aAPCs) expressing membrane-bound IL-15 (mbIL15) have been used to propagate clinical-grade NK cells for human trials of adoptive immunotherapy, but ex vivo proliferation has been limited by telomere shortening. We developed K562-based aAPCs with membrane-bound IL-21 (mbIL21) and assessed their ability to support human NK-cell proliferation. In…

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