Enhancing the immune response and tumor suppression effect of antitumor vaccines adjuvanted with non-nucleotide small molecule STING agonist

Abstract

Vaccine adjuvants have been widely used to enhance the immunogenicity of the antigens and elicit long-lasting immune response. However, only few vaccine adjuvants have been approved by the FDA for human use so far. Therefore, there is still an urgent need to develop novel adjuvants for the potential applications in clinical trials. Herein, non-nucleotide small molecule STING agonist diABZI was employed to construct glycopeptide antigen based vaccines for the first time. Immunological evaluation indicated diABZI not only enhanced the production of antibodies and T cell immune responses, but also inhibited tumor growth in tumor-bearing mice in glycopeptide-based subunit vaccines. These results indicated that di-ABZI demonstrates a high potential as adjuvant for the development of cancer vaccines.