Considering the relevance of ovarian cancer and the promising results of our DC-based vaccine, we show here that heat shock-conditioned cell lysates derived from ovarian epithelial carcinoma cell lines have the potential to induce the phenotypic and functional maturation of human DC, which in turn, is able to induce an efficient CD4+ and CD8+ T cell-mediated immune responses against ovarian cancer cell lines in vitro. The gene discussed is CD8A; the disease is ovarian cancer.