Development of a dendritic cell vaccine against measles for patients following hematopoietic cell transplantation.

Most patients who have undergone hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) lose specific immunity to measles. However, due to its immunosuppressive potential, it has been recommended that a live attenuated measles vaccination be administered two years following HCT. Measles virus (MV) glycoproteins including hemagglutinin (HA) are expressed on MV-infected dendritic cells (DCs), and they impair efficient antigen presentation between the DC and T cell. We produced a DC-based vaccine against MV by loading DCs with MV-infected autologous DCs. MV in the infected DCs was inactivated using ultraviolet-B. The DC-based vaccine neither expressed HA nor inhibited allogeneic T cell proliferation, while it induced the production of interferon-gamma (IFN-gamma) by autologous CD4(+) and CD8(+) naive T cells ex vivo. Importantly, the vaccine derived from patients who had undergone HCT also efficiently induced IFN-gamma producing cells. These findings indicate that our DC-based MV vaccine induces MV-specific immunity even in post-HCT patients without causing immunosuppression.