Advantages of Micron-Sized Magnetic Particles for Tracking Dendritic Cells in Preclinical Cancer Vaccine Studies

Roja Rohani¹, Greg Dekaban², Christy Willert², Sonali De Chickera², Paula Foster¹

Successful Tracking of Dendritic cells (DC) is crucial for better understanding of the fate of DC based cancer vaccines. In previous preclinical and clinical studies supreparamagnetic iron oxide (SPIO) particles were used as DC labels and the migration of DC were followed using cellular MRI. Here we show that micron-sized superparamagnetic iron particles (MPIO) enable the detection and quantification of migrating DC. Since MPIO are inert, have high iron content and are readily taken up by DC, they are a very good label for tracking small numbers of cells or cells with less iron content.