Personalized peptide vaccine as a novel immunotherapy against advanced cancer

Abstract

Along with recent advancements in the field of basic and clinical immunology over the past several decades, cancer immunotherapy has shown progress as a novel treatment modality against cancer. We have developed a novel immunotherapeutic approach, the personalized peptide vaccination (PPV), in which, 2–4 suitable peptides are selected based on the patients’ preexisting immune responses against vaccine antigen candidates. Recent clinical trials of PPV have demonstrated the feasibility of this new therapeutic approach in various types of advanced cancers. Infl ammatory factors, such as IL-6 and CRP, and immune suppressive cells, such as myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSC), have been identifi ed as predictive biomarkers in the vaccinated cancer patients. In the near future, other therapeutic approaches to inhibit the infl ammatory factors and MDSC could be combined to increase the clinical effi cacy of PPV for advanced cancer patients.