Treballs Finals de Grau de Farmàcia, Facultat de Farmàcia i Ciències de l'Alimentació, Universitat de Barcelona, 2020. Tutor/a: Pablo Engel RocamoraMultiple sclerosis (MS) is a multifactorial disease characterized by immune
dysregulation, neurodegeneration, and failure of the central nervous system (CNS)
repair mechanisms. Identifying specific myelin-derived peptides as important targets of
the autoreactive immune response has opened the possibility to develop antigen-specific
therapeutic approaches. Dendritic cells (DCs) are the most potent professional antigenpresenting
cells (APCs) of the immune system capable of inducing or suppressing the
T cell response, their effect depends on different factors such as the degree of maturity,
signals obtained from the local microenvironment, communication with other immune
cells or the DCs subtype. Therefore, DCs have proved to be one of the most promising
tools in immunotherapy in order to modify the immune response and restructure
immune tolerance. There are some established protocols in vitro for generating
monocyte-derived tolerogenic-DCs (tol-DCs) that exhibit numerous
immunosuppressive mechanisms. However, the therapeutic potential of DCs has not yet
been fully exploited clinically. In this report, I describe the immunopathogenesis of MS,
different subsets of DCs, the central role of DCs in the initiation of antigen-specific
tolerance, and protocols for generating tol-DCs. In addition, I will discuss the
characterization of tol-DCs for clinical application, as well as recent clinical trials based
on tol-DCs to treat MS
