Personalized peptide vaccines for cancer therapy: current progress and state of the art

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Accumulating evidence for the feasibility and efficacy of cancer immunotherapy is ushering in a paradigm shift for cancer treatment. Notably, immune checkpoint inhibitors, such as antibodies against cytotoxic T-lymphocyte-associated antigen-4 and programmed cell death-1/programmed cell death ligand 1, show substantial clinical benefits in certain types of cancers. Nevertheless, the response rates to immune checkpoint inhibitors are only 20–30% of patients at most, possibly because the activated immune response is not sufficiently specific. The activation of non-tumor-specific cells leads, theoretically, to autoimmunity and not to tumor regression. Therefore, other approaches that can activate tumor-specific immune cells, such as cancer peptide vaccines, must be developed to improve cancer immunotherapeutic options.

Areas covered: In this review, the authors discuss current and future perspectives on cancer-specific immunotherapies, particularly cancer peptide vaccines.

Expert commentary: Personalized peptide vaccines against peptides that are recognized by patient T cells elicit immediate, tumor-specific immune responses. Furthermore, advances in genomics and bioinformatics have facilitated the generation of personalized peptide vaccines derived from neo-antigens, which have proven safe in clinical trials. In the future, combination therapies that utilize checkpoint inhibitors and peptide vaccines may improve response rates and patient outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Cancer immunotherapy
• cancer vaccine
• clinical trial
• gene mutation
• neo-antigen
• next-generation peptide sequencing
• personalized immunotherapy
• personalized peptide vaccine
• tumor antigen

Declaration of interest

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties. Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was not funded.