Cancer vaccine therapy based on peptides

Following numerous unequivocal clinical failures, immunotherapy has become an attractive therapeutic modality. Peptide vaccines are cost-effective compared to other vaccine approaches, and effective epitopes eliciting strong immune response can be selected experimentally in silico and ex vivo. However, the clinical benefits of cancer peptides vaccine have been disappointing in most studies; therefore, we need to prove the clinical beneficial effects for cancer treatment following induction of more powerful cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs). First, the choice of ideal target antigen is essential. Epitopes derived from tumor-associated antigens (TAAs), oncoantigens, vascular endothelial cells and neoantigens are then developed. In particular, wholeexome sequencing enables us to identify the epitopes of neoantigens. The choice of therapeutic objectives is also important and peptide vaccines might be better to be developed as preventative vaccines. Dendritic cells (DCs) vaccine pulsed with peptides is an approach to induce powerful CTLs and might overcome several disadvantages of peptide vaccines as monotherapy. Targeting vaccine therapy against DC subsets in vivo is under development.