Therapeutic Vaccines for Gastrointestinal Malignancies

Abstract

Gastrointestinal (GI) cancers are highly aggressive and display genome instability, gene mutations, immune suppression, immune insensitivity, and desmoplasia. GI cancers represent as one among the most common cancer type with a burden of ~25% worldwide, with each year about 4.5 million global deaths. GI cancers are not preventive, the prognosis of patients with advanced tumors was difficult, and treating the GI cancers is the only option. For many years, the treatment of GI cancer patients involve surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy in combination or alone. The successes oncologists achieved so far was great but not enough, since it is only recently, the very first promising clinical data comes into light in 2015. Hence novel therapeutic ways to treat GI cancer were much required. Presently, it appears that immunotherapy is the answer. Immunotherapy is advancing quickly and outlines, a conventional shift in the treatment of GI cancer through its promising benefits beyond conventional treatments. Currently, researchers are examining a variety of medicines and factors like immune checkpoint inhibitors, ACT, peptide vaccines, cytokines, and antibodies to treat GI cancers. In recent years, the FDA approved the utilization of anti-PD-1, anti-VEGFR2, and anti-CTLA-4, immunotherapy against a few GI cancers including gastric cancer, liver cancer, and colorectal cancers. Among all the GI cancers, biliary tract cancer and pancreatic cancer patients have limited/no immunotherapeutic options at the moment, nonetheless ongoing clinical investigation will provide some assuring therapeutic solutions. It is highly important to overcome the various factors contributing to varied effectiveness of immunotherapy in GI cancers. Researchers are currently investigating the potentiality of cancer stem cells and their specific markers as targets: outcomes from such studies may become new waves in immunotherapy treating GI cancers. Let us hope that oncologists will discover the “Magic bullet” to whitewash GI cancers in the near future and we believe it is just the beginning of the new era for immunotherapy and we have a long road ahead to succeed.