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Review
. 2018 Jan 1;9(2):263-268.
doi: 10.7150/jca.20059. eCollection 2018.

Cancer vaccine: learning lessons from immune checkpoint inhibitors

ZhenLong Ye  1 , Qiming Qian  1 , HuaJun Jin  1 , QiJun Qian  1
Affiliations
Review

Cancer vaccine: learning lessons from immune checkpoint inhibitors

ZhenLong Ye et al. J Cancer. .

Abstract

Cancer vaccines have been exclusively studied all through the past decades, and have made exceptional achievements in cancer treatment. Few cancer vaccines have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), for instance, Provenge, which was approved for the treatment of prostate carcinoma in 2012. Moreover, more recently, T-VEC got approval for the treatment of melanoma. While, the overall therapeutic effects of cancer vaccines have been taken into consideration as below expectations, low antigenicity of targeting antigen and tumor heterogeneity are the two key limiting barriers encountered by the cancer vaccines. Nonetheless, recent developments in cancer immune-therapies together with associated technologies, for instance the unparalleled achievements bagged by immune checkpoint inhibitor based therapies and neo-antigen identification tools, envisage potential improvements in cancer vaccines in respect to the treatments of malignancies. This review brings forth measures for the purpose of refining therapeutic cancer vaccines by learning lessons from the success of PD-1 inhibitor based immune-therapies.

Keywords: Cancer vaccine; PD-1; combination therapy; immune checkpoint inhibitor; immunotherapy.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interest exists.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Cancer vaccines can be designed in a way to target immunogenic neo-antigens, even clonal neo-antigens that are encoded by driver mutations. Furthermore, cancer vaccines can be put to application in combination with immune checkpoint inhibitors.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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