Cellular Cancer Vaccines: an Update on the Development of Vaccines Generated from Cell Surface Antigens

Abstract

A recent advance in anti-cancer therapies has been the use of cancer cells to develop vaccines. However, immunization with cancer cell-based vaccines has not resulted in significant long-term therapeutic benefits. A possible reason for this is that while cancer cells provide surface antigens that are targets for a desired immune response, they also contain a high abundance of housekeeping proteins, carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids, and other intracellular contents that are ubiquitous in all mammalian cells. These ubiquitous molecules are not the intended targets of this therapy approach, and thus, the immune response generated is not sufficient to eliminate the cancer cells present. In this review, a discussion of the cell surface of cancer cells is presented in relation to the goals of improving antigen composition of cancer cell-based vaccines. Strategies to enrich vaccines for cancer-specific antigens are also discussed.

The current value of determining the mismatch repair status of colorectal cancer: A rationale for routine testing

“…To date whole-tumor-cell vaccines (Lokhov and Balashova, 2010), peptide vaccines (Moulton et al, 2002) and viral vector vaccines (bottom), an anti-PD-1 inhibitor (green) blocks PD-L1 binding, enabling the T cell to target the tumor cell. (For simplicity, the tumor cell is drawn as the source for the PD-L1; however, in some tumours, such as MSI CRC, the dominant source may be macrophages or other tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes and myeloid cells) (Fusi et al, 2015;Llosa et al, 2015;Taube et al, 2014).…”

Design of universal cancer vaccines using natural tumor vessel-specific antigens (SANTAVAC)

“…These findings supported the in vitro design of an UCV with a targeting efficacy of 2.45. 39 Herein, efficacy is defined as the fold difference between the number of killed target HMECs stimulated to grow by tumor cells compared to the number of killed HMEC targets stimulated to grow by normal tissue cells. This efficacy provides a therapeutic window in which tumor HMEC cells could be killed before normal tissue HMECs are adversely affected.…”

“…1A) in the presence of tumor-conditioned medium collected from different cancer cells. [37][38][39][40] Changes in the cell surface profiles were characterized by cell proteomic footprinting (CPF), an advanced proteomics approach used to characterize cell phenotypes via mass spectrometric analysis of extracellular surface (Fig. 2).…”

SANTAVAC ™: A Novel Universal Antigen Composition for Developing Cancer Vaccines

“…For example, is has already been established that mice vaccinated with ECs had delayed tumor growth [32, 72-75]. However, using SANTAVAC™ in mice would not be very efficacious because results obtained as a consequence of xenovaccination [76] would be a poor reflection of SANTAVAC™ efficacy following administration to an allogeneic recipient.…”