Dec 31, 2022 11:00:00

How do experts view the possibility and challenges of realizing a therapeutic 'cancer vaccine'?

Speaking of cancer treatment methods, many people think of anticancer drug treatment and surgical removal of tumors, but in recent years ' cancer vaccines ' that use vaccine formulations for cancer treatment. is progressing in research and development. Therefore, experts summarize the prospects, possibilities, and challenges of cancer vaccines.

Cancer vaccines: the next immunotherapy frontier | Nature Cancer

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43018-022-00418-6

Vaccines generally refer to pharmaceuticals that acquire immunity against infectious diseases by administering antigens made from pathogens. On the other hand, 'cancer vaccine' is a cancer immunotherapy that administers antigens such as genes and proteins that are specifically expressed in cancer cells as vaccines and induces T cells to attack cancer cells. It's kind of.

The idea of treating cancer (malignant tumors) with vaccines dates back to the 1910s, and in recent years cancer vaccines have reduced huge cancer tumors and improved patient survival rates, showing promising results. Several research results have been reported showing that On the other hand, there is still strong skepticism about the practical application of cancer vaccines due to the scale of clinical trials, the limited effectiveness in improving survival rates, and the need for resource-intensive approaches.

However, experts who published a report in the scientific journal Nature point out that this tough road is similar to the history of cancer immunotherapy, which has become a leading option for cancer treatment at the time of writing the article. For example, for 20 years until the success of rituximab in 1997, trials of monoclonal antibodies important in cancer immunotherapy yielded disproportionate results.

And while the success of other cancer immunotherapies tends to draw less attention to cancer vaccines, they 'have the potential to target a broad set of cancer intracellular antigens.' It has clear advantages. In a report, experts argue that cancer vaccines are poised for success and could become the standard of care for cancer in the future.

There are multiple types of cancer vaccines, but they can be broadly divided according to whether or not the target cancer antigen is predefined.

A type of cancer vaccine that experts call 'predefined shared antigen vaccines' targets antigens that are commonly expressed in a certain number of patient groups that share, for example, a tumor type. . Advantages include being more resource intensive and less time consuming than individualized approaches and being more accessible as an 'off the shelf' drug. Specific antigens have already been discovered in multiple cancer types, and some cancer vaccine research is adopting this approach.

Unlike defined antigen-sharing vaccines, those that target specific antigens for specific patients are called ``Predefined personalized antigen vaccines'' in the report. This approach is more sophisticated than defined antigen-sharing vaccines, and can be combined with

immune checkpoint inhibitors to enhance broad T-cell reactivity. Cancer vaccines need to be optimized for each patient, making them time-consuming and resource-intensive to create, but the use of machine learning algorithms is driving down development costs, making it a promising treatment. It is becoming

On the other hand, there are also 'Anonymous antigen vaccines' that are not predefined for target cancer antigens. Anonymous antigen vaccines rely on an endogenous tumor suppressor protein, APC , that induces uptake of antigens near the tumor site.

``While the past 50 years of research have resulted in many failures, cancer vaccines are now poised for success for several reasons,'' the experts argued in their report. The understanding of immune cells that are effective in cancer treatment has improved, and clinically significant reports have been collected.

On the other hand, one of the challenges is the pharmacodynamic evaluation before moving cancer vaccines to clinical trials. To date, the lack of reliably measurable pharmacodynamic evaluation methods for cancer vaccines has led to the failure of poorly supported cancer vaccines to move into clinical trials, leading to setbacks for the entire field. matter. Therefore, the introduction of an approach that can accurately assess the immune response of cancer vaccines would enable the rapid identification of the most potent cancer vaccines, leading to faster commercialization of cancer vaccines, experts argue. Did.