Inducing Immune Responses.

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Summary The use of patients own dendritic cells pulsed with a specific antigen to induce T-cells responses and induction of memory T-cells is widely known as an approach for stimulating the immune system in individualized medicine. This approach entails isolation of monocytes from the blood (where their numbers are relatively low) and their differentiation into dendritic cells over many days in cell culture. Therefore, this process is labor intensive, requires large blood volumes and makes contamination a potential major problem limiting the use of this approach as common procedure in individualized medicine. This invention presents the platelets as a much better platform for this type of therapy. They are very numerous in the blood and would not have to be differentiated and cultured, limiting the time needed and the possibility of contamination. Platelets are useful vehicles to induce immune responses. One example is to use platelets to induce or augment T-cell responses - this will be beneficial as a novel form of vaccination or as a means to augment traditional vaccine responses.