Peptide vaccines against cancer, infectious diseases, and conception

Abstract

The concept of peptide vaccines is based on identification and chemical synthesis of B-cell and T-cell epitopes which are immunodominant and can induce specific immune responses. B-cell epitope of a target molecule can be coupled to a promiscuous T-cell epitope to make it immunogenic. Our increased understanding of antigen recognition at molecular level has resulted in the development of rationally designed peptide vaccines. The relative ease of construction and production, chemical stability, and lack of oncogenic or infectious potential has made the peptides attractive vaccine candidates. However, several obstacles limit the widespread usefulness of peptide vaccines. These include their low immunogenicity, need for a better adjuvant and carrier, and reliable and simple assays to measure T-cell response. Nonetheless, current efforts are defying these limitations and many promising discoveries are making their way to improve this approach. The peptide vaccines against various cancers have undergone phase I and phase II clinical trials with successful immunological clinical outcome. The peptide vaccination is being examined both for palliative and prophylactic immunotherapy. The current status of many peptide vaccines which are being developed against cancer, infectious diseases, and conception is discussed in this review.

Long-Term Immunity against Actual Poxviral HLA Ligands as Identified by Differential Stable Isotope Labeling

“…Therefore, modified vaccinia virus Ankara (MVA), an attenuated replication-deficient strain of VACV, is currently being tested as a safer third-generation vaccine (5,(7)(8)(9). A more detailed understanding of the CTL response to MVA allows both the development of epitope-based vaccines promising a safe, stable, and handy alternative to traditional vaccination strategies, as well as the monitoring of clinical trials by following MVA-specific T cell responses (10,11). Furthermore, MVA has been successfully introduced as a highly immunogenic recombinant viral vector vaccine for immunotherapy of infectious diseases and cancer (12), which requires the assessment of T cell epitope-specific responses elicited against vector and recombinant Ags.…”

Targeting human telomerase reverse transcriptase with recombinant lentivector is highly effective to stimulate antitumor CD8 T-cell immunity in vivo

“…These include HLA restriction, low immunogenicity, the need for adjuvants and carriers, failure or absence of epitope expression on tumor cells, low level of memory responses, and their inability to break immune tolerance. 40 Recently, the use of potent viral vectors, such as lentiviral vectors, can allow us to circumvent many of these obstacles. The mouse survival time was estimated using the Kaplan-Meier method and recorded until 80 days.…”

Multiple Antigenic Peptides Based on H-2Kb–Restricted CTL Epitopes from Murine Heparanase Induce a Potent Antitumor Immune ResponseIn Vivo

“…Thus, the widespread use of peptide vaccines has been limited (14). Another possible explanation is the frequent presence of regulatory T cells (Treg) in patients with cancer.…”

“…Furthermore, inhibition of heparanase significantly reduced invasion and metastasis of tumor cells (3,(11)(12)(13), and several potent heparanase inhibitors have shown promising efficacy at the preclinical stage. One of representative heparanase inhibitors, PI-88, has been evaluated in a multicenter phase II or III clinical trial (1,6), but due to the multiple biologic activities of heparanase inhibitors, the mechanism of their antitumor activity and their relation with heparanase inhibition are not clear; therefore, the application of heparanase inhibitors in the clinic may require further studies (14). Accumulating evidence suggests that heparanase can serve as a universal TAA for the immunotherapy of cancer (7,(15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20).…”