ISSN: 2578-5044
Authors: Nemat Khansari
At present, cancer is the most lethal disease in developed countries. Although many of cancer patients respond to conventional anticancer therapies, including surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy, some cases relapse and even become resistant to therapy. Particularly, metastatic cancers are difficult to treat. Therefore, novel therapeutic approaches with better clinical efficacy are required for advanced cancers. In the past decades, our understanding of tumor immunology has been increased noticeably and immunotherapy has been investigated for treatment of cancer. However, the complex relationships between tumor cells and immune cells influence the outcome of immunotherapy. Cancer vaccines are being explored widely to either prevent cancer or to treat disease. Recently, two prophylactic cancer vaccines have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug administration (FDA) for virus-induced cancers. Other cancer vaccines showed limited successes which is more likely due to inability in identification of tumor specific antigens. Tumor cells can harbor mutations in mismatch repair genes that prevent the repair of DNA errors that arise as cell division. These cells have high potential to create neoantigens. As immune responses can be efficiently produced against neoantigens, neoantigens can be used to develop cancer vaccine. However, some of antigens produced in mismatch repair-deficient tumors are also produced by normal cells, and cancer vaccines using these shared antigens may show unintentional side effects. But, a tumor specific neoantigen-based vaccine wouldn't induce such side effects. Furthermore, combining of tumor-specific neoantigen vaccine with other cancer therapies could result in high clinical efficacy. In this article, we discuss recent advancements in cancer vaccines, especially neoantigen-based cancer vaccines, and personalized cancer immunotherapy.
Keywords: Cancer; Immunotherapy; Vaccine, Immune Responses; Tumor Associated Antigens; Clinical Efficacy
