Treatment of tumors by protocols based on combination of surgery, radiotherapy and systemic chemotherapy resulted in the improved prognosis of many human cancers. Despite the continuous introduction of new drugs and further improvements of chemotherapy protocols, it's likely that at some point chemotherapy will reach its limits and clinical efficacy will plateau. Immunotherapy has emerged as another treatment modality with the potential to contribute to further improvements in the survival. The products of advanced cellular terapies must be generated using GMP-approved reagents and number of studies have addressed the need to generate large numbers of DCs for clinical trials according to regulatory authorities and to current legislation. The rising knowledge about dendritic cells (DCs) in the immune response against tumors and the ability to prepaire DCs in vitro leaded to the establishment of immunotherapy protocols. Breakthrough studies that identified markers of immunogenic tumor cell death after chemotherapy treatment challenge the long-time perception of chemotherapy and immunotherapy as opposing and incompatible treatment modalities. My PhD thesis is a contributiont to this topic. In the first paper we identified monocyte-derived DCs that were generated in CellGro and activated using PolyI:C as the..
