Many efforts have been made to improve the efficacy of dendritic cell (DC) vaccines in DC-based cancer immunotherapy. One of these efforts is to deliver a DC vaccine more efficiently to the regional lymph nodes (rLNs) to induce stronger anti-tumor immunity. Together with chemotaxis, transendothelial migration (TEM) is believed to be a critical and indispensable step for DC vaccine migration to the rLNs after administration. However, the mechanism underlying the in vitro-generated DC TEM in DC-based cancer immunotherapy has been largely unknown. Currently, junctional adhesion molecules (JAMs) were found to play an important role in the TEM of in vitro generated DC vaccines. This paper reviews the TEM of DC vaccines and TEM-associated JAM molecules.
Keywords: DC vaccine; JAML; JAMs; cancer immunotherapy; chemotaxis; regional LNs.