Dendritic Cells and their Receptors in Antitumor Immune Response

DCs are recognized as the pivotal group of lymphocytes, which induce a variety of antitumor immune responses. Enduring professional antigen presenting cells, DCs eminence to induce adaptive antitumor immune response was exploited, which showed promising results in DCs-based phased clinical studies. Nevertheless, DCs also influence other immune cells to induce multiple arms of immune system to cure cancer. Recently, direct cytotoxic capacity of DCs has been demonstrated in several studies. Altogether DCs hold a strong link between innate and adaptive immune responses. DCs are known to kill tumor cells, phagocytose immunogenic substrates and present a wide variety of antigens to prime T cells to induce concerted antitumor responses. These functional aspects of DCs are dependent on the receptors that participate in the stimulation of DCs. In this review, we have discussed these receptors that are known to induce direct cytotoxicity as well as the receptors that greatly influence their antigen presentation functions. Thus DCs are turning out to be an important cell type in cancer immunotherapy.