Dendritic Cell-immunotherapy for Advanced Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a high malignant tumor with a rapidly progressive clinical course. Surgery is the first choice of the treatment. However, most HCC patients have numerous tumors upon diagnosis, which are not possible to be treated by surgical resection. Currently, several treatment options are applied to treat unresectable HCC, including transcartheter arterial chemoembolization (TACE), percutaneous ethanol injection, radiofrequency ablation, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Nevertheless, the therapeutic results of these treatment modalities are unsatisfied.

TACE is frequently applied to treat the patients with unresectable HCCs in daily practice. Embolization blocks the arterial blood supply to the tumor and results in tumor necrosis. However, clinical benefits are limited, and the response rate is only 30% Dendritic cells (DC), the most potent antigen-presenting cells, serve as a cancer vaccine to conduct an antigen-specific anti-tumor therapy. Dendritic cell-based immunotherapy has been applied to treat advanced HCC in our previous study. The clinical results of this study verify the feasibility of DC-based immunotherapy for HCC. However, the results are still unsatisfied.

In this proposal, investigators are going to treatment the patients having unresectable HCCs with DC vaccination followed by TACE. DC vaccination can provoke antigen-specific immunity and induce memory T-cells. TACE following DC vaccination may further promote T-cell immunity to treat cancer. Therefore, the specific aims in this study are:

1. To determine whether DC vaccination followed by TACE can treat HCC effectively in a clinical trial.
2. To determine whether DC vaccination can provoke memory T cells and following TACE can further promote anti-HCC immunity.

The achievement of this clinical trial will help to establish a new strategy for the treatment of unresectable HCC.