Peptide-based therapeutic cancer vaccine: Current trends in clinical application

The peptide-based therapeutic cancer vaccines have attracted enormous attention in recent years as one of the effective treatments of tumour immunotherapy. Most of peptide-based vaccines are based on epitope peptides stimulating CD8⁺ T cells or CD4⁺ T helper cells to target tumour-associated antigens (TAAs) or tumour-specific antigens (TSAs). Some adjuvants and nanomaterials have been exploited to optimize the efficiency of immune response of the epitope peptide to improve its clinical application. At present, numerous peptide-based therapeutic cancer vaccines have been developed and achieved significant clinical benefits. Similarly, the combination of peptide-based vaccines and other therapies has demonstrated a superior efficacy in improving anti-cancer activity. We delve deeper into the choices of targets, design and screening of epitope peptides, clinical efficacy and adverse events of peptide-based vaccines, and strategies combination of peptide-based therapeutic cancer vaccines and other therapies. The review will provide a detailed overview and basis for future clinical application of peptide-based therapeutic cancer vaccines.