RESUMO
Distinct from conventional cancer therapies focusing directly on local tumors, cancer immunotherapy aims to restore or enhance immune surveillance to fight against cancer, which bears the advantages of less side effects, lasting efficacy, substantial specificity and suitability for individualized treatment. As the most powerful antigen-presenting cell type, dendritic cells (DCs) can induce potent antigen-specific immune responses in vivo. DCs-based immunotherapy acts by loading DCs with cancer antigens in various ways to elicit specific anti-tumor immune responses. Currently, pulsing DCs with cancer antigen encoding mRNAs is an antigen loading approach under extensive study, registering encouraging results in relevant immunotherapeutic clinical trials. Thus, pulsing DCs with mRNAs is a new and highly promising modality in cancer immunotherapy.