There is convincing evidence that IL-18 plays an important role in various pathologies (i.e. inflammatory diseases, cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, Crohn's disease and others).
These results indicate that a vaccination therapy using DC co-transduced with the TAA gene and IL-18 genes is effective strategy for immunotherapy in terms of the activation of DCs, CD4+ T, cells and CD8+ T cells, and may be useful in the clinical application of a cancer vaccine therapy.
Since regulation of IL-18 activity likely contributes to the pathogenesis of inflammatory diseases as well as malignancies, we investigated gene expression of IL-18 binding protein (IL-18BP) in different human cell systems, namely in the keratinocyte cell line HaCaT, in the colon carcinoma cell line DLD-1, and in primary renal mesangial cells.
Increased IL-18 levels in the serum of cancer patients correlated with malignancy, and IL-18 acts a crucial factor for cell migration in gastric cancer and melanoma.
These data indicated that oncolytic adenovirus expressing IL-18 could exert potential antitumor activity via inhibition of angiogenesis and offer a novel approach to cancer therapy.
Several lines of evidence suggests that in cancer the inflammasome is positively associated with characteristics such as elevated levels of IL-1β and IL-18, activation of NF-κB signaling, enhanced mitochondrial oxidative stress, and activation of autophagic process.
In this study, we investigated IL-18 expression and its correlation with patient survival and immune cell infiltration in melanoma using cancer gene expression data publicly available through various databases.