Combining vaccines with therapies that render tumor cells more susceptible to immune mediated killing

Abstract

Therapeutic cancer vaccines are an efficient and minimally toxic way to stimulate the host's immune system in a dynamic way such that immune responses persists beyond the period of vaccine administration. The persisting immunity can be utilized by standard of care therapies given concurrently or subsequently to vaccines in the fight against cancer. Emerging pre-clinical and clinical evidence shows that the standard of care anti-cancer therapies can modulate. Both the Tumor and the immune system of the host such as to potentiate the immune response induced by therapeutic cancer vaccines. This book chapter focuses on these combinatorial approaches to cancer that target the residual cancer cells in the host that have not been contained by definitive procedures such as surgery. Specifically, we discuss the biological basis of anti-tumor immunity, immunomodulation with standard of care therapies such as radiation, cytotoxic chemotherapies, hormone abrogation and small molecule inhibitors, pre-clinical and clinical evidence of synergism in combinatorial strategies, clinical trial design and published and ongoing clinical studies in that regard.