A decade ago, it seemed clear that our burgeoning knowledge of the molecular identities of tumor-associated antigens and a deeper understanding of basic immunology would point the way to an effective therapeutic cancer vaccine. Significant progress has been made and objective regressions after immune-based treatments are observed in some patients — even in those with bulky, metastatic disease. ...

Engaging the power of the patient's own immune system to actively seek out and destroy transformed cells holds great promise for cancer therapy. Tumor vaccines offer the potential for preventing cancer in high-risk individuals, preventing disease relapse after diagnosis and initial therapy, and shifting the balance of the host-tumor interaction to mitigate the progression of advanced cancers. T...

Allogeneic cellular cancer vaccines that express tumor antigens specified by tumor-DNA have been found to be effective in the treatment of mice with intracerebral breast cancer, a metastasis model system. The vaccines were prepared by the transfer of genomic DNA from a spontaneously arising adenocarcinoma of the mammary gland into a mouse fibroblast cell line (LM). The immunity in tumor-bearing...

Next generation sequencing enables identification of immunogenic tumor mutations targetable by individualized vaccines. In the B16F10 melanoma system as pre-clinical proof-of-concept model, we found a total of 563 non-synonymous expressed somatic mutations. Of the mutations we tested, one third were immunogenic. Immunization conferred in vivo tumor control, qualifying mutated epitopes as source...

Vaccine studies using whole tumor cells or heterogeneous mixtures of tumor antigens provide intriguing evidence that cancer vaccines might be effective. Now it is possible to test vaccines composed of well-characterized proteins and peptides. Testing vaccine formulations composed of known and defined antigens will allow a more precise determination as to why vaccines work when they work, and wh...

Cancer vaccines targeting non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) have been studied for decades: clinical trials, for the most part, have focused on the use of autologous and allogeneic whole-tumor cell vaccines. Recent advances in molecular biology and immunology, however, have allowed the identification of many tumor antigens involved in the generation of immunity to NSClC. Although small-cell lun...

The development of therapeutic anti-cancer vaccines designed to elicit CTL responses with anti-tumor activity has become a reality thanks to the identification of several tumor-associated Ags and their corresponding peptide T cell epitopes. However, peptide-based vaccines, in general, fail to elicit sufficiently strong CTL responses capable of producing therapeutic anti-tumor effects (i.e., pro...

In the current review the latest literature data on design of cancer vaccines on the basis of xenogenic tumor-associated antigens and proteins that play an important role in tumor progression have been summarized. The main benefits and disadvantages of xenogenic cancer vaccines, the results of experimental studies and clinical trials, and perspectives of use are analyzed.