RESUMO
Colorectal cancer represents 10% of all new cancer cases each year and accounts for almost 10% of all cancer deaths. According to the WHO, by 2040 there will be a 60% increase in colorectal cancer cases. These data highlight the need to explore new therapeutic strategies. Classical interventions include surgical resection, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, which are invasive strategies that have many side effects on the patients and greatly affect their quality of life. A great advance in the treatment of this cancer type, as well as of all the others, could be the development of a vaccination strategy preventing the onset, the progression or the relapse of the pathology. In this review, we summarize the main vaccination strategies that are being studied for the treatment of colorectal cancer (CRC) and finally explore the possibility of using B-cells for the development of a new type of vaccine.
RESUMO
IL-10 is the best known and most studied anti-inflammatory cytokine and, in the last 20 years, it has acquired even greater fame as it has been associated with the regulatory phenotype of B cells. Indeed, although great efforts have been made to find a unique marker, to date IL-10 remains the main way to follow both murine and human regulatory B cells, hence the need of precise and reproducible methods to identify and purify IL-10-producing B cells for both functional and molecular downstream assays. In this chapter, we present our protocols to isolate these cells from the murine spleen and peritoneum and from human peripheral blood. Since the production of IL-10 by B cells is not only a weapon to counteract the adverse effect of pro-inflammatory cytokines but also a response to cellular activation, we focused on those B cells that are prone to IL-10 production and detectable following a short-term stimulation with phorbol-12-myristate-13-acetate, ionomycin, and lipopolysaccharide (murine system) or CpG (human system).