Nina Bhardwaj.

• Localización: Scientific American, ISSN 0036-8733, Vol. 291, Nº. 6, 2004, págs. 50-50
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Reports on the efforts made by Nina Bhardwaj, professor of medicine and director of the cancer vaccine program at New York University School of Medicine, to create dendritic cell vaccines. Dendritic cells' key role in priming the immune system gives them formidable potential as therapeutic vaccines for fighting cancers and viruses such as HIV. These spiny cells' main job in the body is to display antigens--distinctive bits of undesirable invaders--to the immune system's foot soldiers, called killer T cells, for future recognition and attack. Bhardwaj also showed how tumor cells can suppress dendritic cells and, in another study, demonstrated that dendritic cells' activity appears not to be diminished by hepatitis C, a common co-infection in HIV patients. She is currently conducting two clinical trials of dendritic cell vaccines in HIV patients and planning for another vaccine trial in melanoma patients soon.