Cancer vaccination by electro-gene-transfer

Abstract

Therapeutic vaccination could become an important modality to fight cancer. Efficacious immune responses against cancer cells have to be directed simultaneously against multiple epitopes belonging to tumor-associated antigens and will require the involvement of both CD4⁺ and CD8⁺ cells as well as antibodies. The inoculation of a nucleic acid coding for a protein antigen by means of intradermal or intramuscular injection is a simple and cheap approach to induce an immune response against a target antigen. For long time, however, clinical translation of this concept has suffered from the poor immunogenicity of plasmid DNA vaccines in larger species. An emerging technology potentially capable of overcoming these limitations is in vivo electroporation. In this review, we report recent data showing initial evidence of immunogenicity by gene-electro-transfer in the clinic and discuss how new vector development combined with in vivo electroporation will allow nucleic acid vaccination to become a robust approach to fight cancer.

Keywords::

• clinical trials
• DNA and RNA vaccines ogeneticvaccination
• immunotherapy of cancer
• in vivo electroporation

Acknowledgments

The authors thank C Roffi for editorial assistance.

Financial & competing interests disclosure

G Ciliberto’s work was supported in part by a grant (AIRC IG 10334). L Aurisicchio’s work was supported in part by a grant (AIRC IG 10507). The authors have no other 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 apart from those disclosed.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.