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Trial Watch: DNA vaccines for cancer therapy.

ABSTRACT: During the past 2 decades, the possibility that preparations capable of eliciting tumor-specific immune responses would mediate robust therapeutic effects in cancer patients has received renovated interest. In this context, several approaches to vaccinate cancer patients against their own malignancies have been conceived, including the administration of DNA constructs coding for one or more tumor-associated antigens (TAAs). Such DNA-based vaccines conceptually differ from other types of gene therapy in that they are not devised to directly kill cancer cells or sensitize them to the cytotoxic activity of a drug, but rather to elicit a tumor-specific immune response. In spite of an intense wave of preclinical development, the introduction of this immunotherapeutic paradigm into the clinical practice is facing difficulties. Indeed, while most DNA-based anticancer vaccines are well tolerated by cancer patients, they often fail to generate therapeutically relevant clinical responses. In this Trial Watch, we discuss the latest advances on the use of DNA-based vaccines in cancer therapy, discussing the literature that has been produced around this topic during the last 13 months as well as clinical studies that have been launched in the same time frame to assess the actual therapeutic potential of this intervention.

SUBMITTER: Pol J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4008456 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Trial Watch: DNA vaccines for cancer therapy.

Pol Jonathan J Bloy Norma N Obrist Florine F Eggermont Alexander A Galon Jérôme J Hervé Fridman Wolf W Cremer Isabelle I Zitvogel Laurence L Kroemer Guido G Galluzzi Lorenzo L

Oncoimmunology 20140101 1

During the past 2 decades, the possibility that preparations capable of eliciting tumor-specific immune responses would mediate robust therapeutic effects in cancer patients has received renovated interest. In this context, several approaches to vaccinate cancer patients against their own malignancies have been conceived, including the administration of DNA constructs coding for one or more tumor-associated antigens (TAAs). Such DNA-based vaccines conceptually differ from other types of gene the ...[more]

PMID: 24800178

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Project description:Throughout the past 3 decades, along with the recognition that the immune system not only influences oncogenesis and tumor progression, but also determines how established neoplastic lesions respond therapy, renovated enthusiasm has gathered around the possibility of using vaccines as anticancer agents. Such an enthusiasm quickly tempered when it became clear that anticancer vaccines would have to be devised as therapeutic, rather than prophylactic, measures, and that malignant cells often fail to elicit (or actively suppress) innate and adaptive immune responses. Nonetheless, accumulating evidence indicates that a variety of anticancer vaccines, including cell-based, DNA-based, and purified component-based preparations, are capable of circumventing the poorly immunogenic and highly immunosuppressive nature of most tumors and elicit (at least under some circumstances) therapeutically relevant immune responses. Great efforts are currently being devoted to the identification of strategies that may provide anticancer vaccines with the capacity of breaking immunological tolerance and eliciting tumor-associated antigen-specific immunity in a majority of patients. In this sense, promising results have been obtained by combining anticancer vaccines with a relatively varied panels of adjuvants, including multiple immunostimulatory cytokines, Toll-like receptor agonists as well as inhibitors of immune checkpoints. One year ago, in the December issue of OncoImmunology, we discussed the biological mechanisms that underlie the antineoplastic effects of peptide-based vaccines and presented an abundant literature demonstrating the prominent clinical potential of such an approach. Here, we review the latest developments in this exciting area of research, focusing on high-profile studies that have been published during the last 13 mo and clinical trials launched in the same period to evaluate purified peptides or full-length proteins as therapeutic anticancer agents.

Dataset Information

Trial Watch: DNA vaccines for cancer therapy.

Publications

Trial Watch: DNA vaccines for cancer therapy.

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