[Cancer Vaccine Focused on Neoantigens]

Recent advances in cancer immunotherapies, such as immune checkpoint inhibitors(ICIs), have shown some durable clinical responses in patients with various types of advanced cancers. The development of the next-generation sequencing technologies can result in a comprehensive characterization of the human cancer genomes. Personalized immunotherapy and precision cancer medicine might enable the next generation of rational cancer immunotherapy. Conventional cancer vaccines are designed to target tumor-associated antigens(TAAs), which are overexpressed in cancers. However, since TAAs are also expressed in normal tissues, cancer vaccine against TAAs can potentially initiate central and peripheral tolerance responses, which results in low vaccination efficiency. Cancer neoantigens derived from somatic mutations in tumor tissue represent highly immunogenic and can escape from central thymic tolerance. They are suggested to provide tumor specific targets for personalized cancer vaccines. Therefore, neoantigen-based cancer vaccine, which can induce tumor-specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes( CTLs), should be developed. The efficacy of current immunotherapies also remains limited due to the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment, which leads to CTLs exhaustion or anergy and the escape of tumor cells from immune attack. The combination of neoantigen-based cancer vaccine and ICIs should be a potential therapeutic approach. In this paper, we provide a brief overview of the recent advances in the development of neoantigen-based cancer vaccines.