Cancer cell death can be immunogenic or nonimmunogenic depending on the initiating stimulus. The immunogenic characteristics of immunogenic cell death are mainly mediated by damage-associated molecular patterns represented by preapoptotic exposure of calreticulin and heat shock proteins (HSP70 and HSP90) from endoplasmic reticulum at the cell surface and active secretion of adenosintriphospate.
Other damage-associated molecular patterns are produced in late stage apoptosis as high mobility group box 1 protein (HMGB1) into the extracellular milieu. Such signals operate on various receptors expressed by antigen presenting cells, mainly by population of dendritic cells, to stimulate the activation of antigen specific T-cell response.
In this review, we describe the current known immunogenic cell death inducers and their potential to activate antitumor immune response. Key words: calreticulin - dendritic cell - immunogenic cell death - antitumor immune response This work was supported by grant IGA MH CZ - NT 12402-5 and MH CZ - DRO, University Hospital Motol, Prague, Czech Republic 00064203.
The authors declare they have no potential conflicts of interest concerning drugs, products, or services used in the study. The Editorial Board declares that the manuscript met the ICMJE recommendation for biomedical papers