Abstract

Natural Killer (NK) cells are a subset of lymphocytes that regulate adaptive immune responses and utilize "missing self" recognition to activate anti-tumor and anti-viral cytotoxicity. Clinical research, as well as murine and ex vivo models, have shown that a variety of NK cell applications have proven useful as immunotherapeutic treatments for patients with hematologic malignancies. However, the selective expansion of NK cells to yield relevant amounts of these lymphocytes has been a major hurdle in the development of methods for clinical therapeutic use. Here, we demonstrate a novel ex vivo expansion method utilizing k562 leukemic cell lines and soluble cytokines as well as a novel method utilizing isolated plasma membranes of genetically engineered tumor cell lines that could be of relevance to in vivo NK cell expansion. Also, the ligand expression by canonical feeder cell lines used for NK cell expansion and our isolated plasma membranes were compared via ligand quantification by western blot quantification of 4-1BB ligand. In an adjunct study, we sought to better characterize these expansion environments by investigating the glucose metabolism of NK cells using fluorescent glucose analog 2-(N-(7-Nitrobenz-2-oxa-1, 3-diazol-4-yl)Amino)-2-Deoxyglucose (2-NBDG) and the glycolysis inhibitor 2-Deoxy-D-Glucose (2-DG).

Notes

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Thesis Completion

2012

Semester

Summer

Advisor

Borgon, Robert

Degree

Bachelor of Science (B.S.)

College

Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences

Degree Program

Molecular Biology and Microbiology

Subjects

Dissertations, Academic -- Medicine;Medicine -- Dissertations, Academic

Format

PDF

Identifier

CFH0004252

Language

English

Access Status

Open Access

Length of Campus-only Access

None

Document Type

Honors in the Major Thesis

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