Cross talk between dendritic and natural killer cells in the presence of vaccine agent against cervical cancer

Abstract

Cervical cancer is caused by infection with high-risk human papillomaviruses (HPV). Recently, prophylactic vaccines based on HPV virus like particles (VLP) have become available. These vaccines are efficient to HPV-16 and HPV-18 infections, but not against established infection. Previous studies have shown that HPV-VLP were able to activate dendritic cells (DC). NK cell activation in vaccination protocols has been rarely studied; we studied the effect of VLP on the interaction between DC and NK cells in an autologous setting. We confirmed previous studies and when we co-cultured VLP activated DC and NK cells, we observed an increase in cell surface expression of CD69. This up-regulation was also accompanied by increased IFN-' secretion in the presence of VLP. Interestingly, NK cells seemed to further activate DC in the presence of VLP as shown by up-regulation of HLA-DR, CD86 and CD80 on DC. Moreover we found that NK cells synergise with VLP in modulating DC cytokine secretion, sinc