Dasatinib Promotes the Maturation of Healthy Donors and Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia Patients Derived Dendritic Cells

Dasatinib has been discovered to obtain immunomodulatory effects in addition to the targeting effect towards BCR-ABL in chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) patients. But the effect of dasatinib on dendritic cells (DCs) is still not fully understood. Objective To investigate the effect of dasatinib on the maturation of monocyte derived dendritic cells (moDCs) from healthy donors (HDs) and CML patients. Method Peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) were isolated from HDs (n=14) and CML patients (n=14) who had got remission of MR4.5 with imatinib treatment. The generation of moDCs was completed after 7 days of incubation in DC I medium, and another 3 days of incubation in DC II medium with or without 25nM dasatinib. On the 10^th day, the moDCs were harvested and analyzed for the expression of surface markers CD83, CD80, CD86, CD40 and HLA-DR to reflect the maturation of the moDCs by flow cytometry. Results When analyzing the moDCs from all the 14 HDs together, dasatinib significantly enhanced the expression levels of the surface marker CD83 (P=0.039), CD40 (P=0.002) and HLA-DR (P=0.000) on moDCs compared with the control group, but there was no statistically significant difference in CD80 (P=0.073) and CD86 (P=0.897). Differently, when analyzing the moDCs derived from all the 14 patients together, there was no statistically significant difference in the expression levels of CD80 (P=0.086), CD86 (P=0.166), CD83 (P=0.674), CD40 (P=0.574) and HLA-DR (P=0.561) on moDCs between the dasatinib group and the control group. However, moDCs derived from 3 of the 14 patients show the enhanced expression of all the five surface makers with dasatinib administration compared to the control group. Besides, the moDCs derived from 6 of the 14 patients show the enhanced expression of at least one of the five surface markers. Notably, compared with moDCs derived from HD group (n=14), moDCs from patient group (n=14) express lower levels of CD80 (P=0.340), CD86 (P=0.007), CD40 (P=0.010), CD83 (P=0.019) and HLA-DR (P=0.036). Conclusion Dasatinib at the concentration of 25nM can efficiently promote the maturation of HD-derived moDCs in vitro, whereas this effect only occurs in part of the CML patients. And the moDCs from patients generally show much lower levels of the maturation associated surface makers compared with moDCs from HDs. Dasatinib shows potential as a DC adjuvant to be applied in DC-based therapeutic strategies, such as DC vaccine and DC cell-therapy.