Abstract
In the past few decades, great progress has been made in the clinical application of dendritic cell (DC) vaccines loaded with personalized neoantigens. Personalized neoantigens are antigens arising from somatic mutations in cancers, with specificity to each patient. DC vaccines work based on the fundamental characteristics of DCs, which are professional antigen-presenting cells (APCs), responsible for the uptake, processing, and presentation of antigens to T cells to activate immune responses. Neoantigens can exert their antitumor effects only after they are taken up by APCs and presented to T cells. In recent years, neoantigen-based personalized tumor therapeutic vaccines have proven to be safe, immunogenic and feasible treatment strategies in patients with melanoma and glioblastoma that provide new hope in the treatment of cancer patients and a new approach to cure cancer. In addition, according to ClinicalTrials.gov, hundreds of registered DC vaccine trials are either completed or ongoing worldwide, of which 9 are in early phase I, 191 in phase I, 166 in phase II and 8 in phase III. Hundreds of clinical studies on therapeutic tumor vaccines globally have proven that DC vaccines are stable, reliable and very safe. However, in this process, many other factors still limit the effectiveness of the vaccine. This review will focus on the current research progress on personalized neoantigen-pulsed DC vaccines, their limitations and future research directions of DC vaccines loaded with neoantigens. This review aims to provide a better understanding of DCs biology and manipulation of activated DCs for DCs researchers to produce the next generation of highly efficient cancer vaccines for patients.
Highlights
Malignant tumors are still an acute threat for people worldwide and the incidence and mortality from cancer are still rapidly growing
Because of the side effects of conventional treatments, cancer immunotherapy has been developed as a therapeutic method with better tumor targeting, safety, and a lower toxicity
We summarize the progress and clinical application of personalized neoantigen-pulsed dendritic cell (DC) cancer vaccines
Summary
Malignant tumors are still an acute threat for people worldwide and the incidence and mortality from cancer are still rapidly growing. Conventional methods and systems for treating cancer have been developed, including surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy alone or in combination. Radiotherapy is the most suitable method for tumors in all parts of the body, the radiation dose that the body can withstand is limited, and normal cells are damaged when tumor cells are destroyed. Chemotherapy is successful for some tumors, such as testicular tumors, it can cause severe side effects, such as hair loss, anemia and organ damage, reducing the patients’ quality of life [2, 3]. Because of the side effects of conventional treatments, cancer immunotherapy has been developed as a therapeutic method with better tumor targeting, safety, and a lower toxicity
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