Ex vivo assessment of in vivo DC-targeted antibodies in pre-clinical models

APCs play a key role at initiating adaptive immune responses by presenting antigens to lymphocytes and DCs are professional APCs. It is critical to understand the differential antigen capture and presentation ability of different DC subsets, which is important for DC-targeted immunotherapy. In this section, we give a brief introduction to different antigen presentation pathways and introduce the key concept of cross-presentation, the major antigen presentation pathway used for anti-viral and anti-tumoral immune responses. CD205, a DC restricted receptor, is highly expressed on certain DCs subsets. We find CD205-mediated antigen uptake to be a useful model for studying antigen uptake and defects. These methods provide an introduction to CD205-mediated pre-clinical delivery of antigens to cross-presenting DCs, which can be adapted to the study of targeting to multiple receptors and other C-type lectins. This is a promising strategy to detect the antigen capture capacity and to study the key players orchestrating tolerance and immunity ex vivo.