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Curdlan blocks the immune suppression by myeloid-derived suppressor cells and reduces tumor burden

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Abstract

Tumor-elicited immunosuppression is one of the essential mechanisms for tumor evasion of immune surveillance. It is widely thought to be one of the main reasons for the failure of tumor immunotherapy. Myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSCs) comprise a heterogeneous population of cells that play an important role in tumor-induced immunosuppression. These cells expand in tumor-bearing individuals and suppress T cell responses via various mechanisms. Curdlan, the linear (1 → 3)-β-glucan from Agrobacterium, has been applied in the food industry and other sectors. The anti-tumor property of curdlan has been recognized for a long time although the underlying mechanism still needs to be explored. In this study, we investigated the effect of curdlan on MDSCs and found that curdlan could promote MDSCs to differentiate into a more mature state and then significantly reduce the suppressive function of MDSCs, decrease the MDSCs in vivo and down-regulate the suppression in tumor-bearing mice, thus leading to enhanced anti-tumor immune responses. We, therefore, increase the understanding of further mechanisms by which curdlan achieves anti-tumor effects.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Specialized Project for Clinical Medicine of Jiangsu Province (Grant No. BL2014065), Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu (Grant No. BK20150533), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 31170849, 31470881), Science and Technology Support Program (Social Development) of Zhenjiang (Grant Nos. SH2014039, SH2014042), Jiangsu Province “333” Project (Grant No. BRA2015197), Summit of the Six Top Talents Program of Jiangsu Province (Grant No. 2015-WSN-116), Jiangsu University Science Foundation (Grant Nos. 15JDG070, 11JDG093, FCJJ2015022), Graduate Student Research and Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province (Grant No. KYLX_1074), and Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions.

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    Authors and Affiliations

    1. Department of Laboratory Medicine, The Affiliated People’s Hospital, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, 212002, China

      Ke Rui, Jie Tian, Xinyi Tang & Shengjun Wang

    2. Institute of Laboratory Medicine, Jiangsu Key Laboratory for Laboratory Medicine, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, 212013, China

      Ke Rui, Jie Tian, Jie Ma, Xinyu Tian, Yungang Wang, Huaxi Xu & Shengjun Wang

    3. Department of Laboratory Medicine, The Fifth People’s Hospital of Suzhou, Suzhou, China

      Ping Xu

    4. Department of Pathology and Centre of Infection and Immunology, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

      Liwei Lu

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    1. Ke Rui
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    Jie Tian and Ke Rui have contributed equally to this work.

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    Rui, K., Tian, J., Tang, X. et al. Curdlan blocks the immune suppression by myeloid-derived suppressor cells and reduces tumor burden. Immunol Res 64, 931–939 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12026-016-8789-7

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