When it comes to cancer treatment, many people think of chemotherapy or surgical removal of tumors. However, recently, research and development of cancer vaccines using vaccine preparations for cancer treatment are in progress.
Generally speaking, a vaccine refers to a medicine that acquires immunity once morest an infection by administering an antigen made from a pathogen. In contrast, cancer vaccine is a type of cancer immunotherapy in which antigens such as genes or proteins that are specifically expressed in cancer cells are administered as vaccines and induce T cells to attack cancer cells.
The idea of treating cancer with a vaccine dates back to the 1910s, and recently several studies have been reported showing promising results that cancer vaccines can shrink huge cancer tumors or increase patient survival. On the other hand, there are skepticisms regarding the commercialization of cancer vaccines, such as the limitations of the clinical trial scale, the effect on survival rate improvement, and the need for a resource-intensive approach.
But experts who published a report in the journal Nature point out that this rigorous path resembles the history that followed cancer immunotherapy, which has become a promising option for cancer treatment. For example, over the 20 years leading up to the success of Rituximab in 1997, monoclonal antibody trials important in cancer immunotherapy did not yield reproducible results.
Although it is easy to lose interest in cancer vaccines because of the success of other cancer immunotherapies, cancer vaccines have the clear advantage of being able to target a broad set of antigens within cancer cells. In the report, the expert argues that cancer vaccines are poised for success, but have the potential to become standard cancer treatments in the future.
There are many types of cancer vaccines, but they can be largely divided in terms of whether or not the target cancer antigen is defined in advance. Type cancer vaccines, which experts call predefined shared antigen vaccines, target antigens commonly expressed in a certain number of patient groups that share a tumor type, etc. The advantage is that it is less resource intensive and time consuming than individualized approaches and is easier to use as an off-the-shelf drug. Specific antigens have already been found in several cancer types, and some cancer vaccine studies are adopting this approach.
Unlike predefined shared antigen vaccines, vaccines that target a specific antigen in a specific patient are called predefined personalized antigen vaccines. This approach is more sophisticated than predefined antigen-sharing vaccines and can increase broad-spectrum T-cell reactivity in combination with immune checkpoint inhibitors. Because cancer vaccines need to be optimized for each patient, production takes time and requires a large amount of resources, but the development cost is gradually lowered by the use of machine learning algorithms, making it a promising treatment.
Meanwhile, there are also anonymous antigen vaccines that do not have a predefined target cancer antigen. The vaccine relies on the endogenous cancer suppressor protein APC, which induces uptake of antigens near tumor sites.
Research over the past 50 years has had many setbacks, but cancer vaccines say they are now headed for success for several reasons. As the understanding of immune cells effective for cancer treatment has increased and clinically significant reports have been collected, continuing research will lead to practical use.
On the other hand, one of the tasks is the pharmacodynamic evaluation of the pre-stage of moving cancer vaccines into clinical trials. It is said that the entire field has retreated as cancer vaccines that have not been sufficiently supported due to the lack of reliable measurable pharmacodynamic evaluation methods have been transferred to clinical trials and ended in failure. Therefore, if an approach that can accurately evaluate the cancer vaccine immune response is introduced, the most powerful cancer vaccine can be quickly identified, and as a result, cancer vaccine commercialization will be accelerated. Related information this placecan be found in
