Breakthrough Therapeutic Cancer Vaccines: Overcoming Challenges & Unlocking the Future of Immunotherapy
Authors:
Dr Babaji Yadav
Principal Consultant
Introduction
Vaccines are defined as medicinal products intended for prevention, post-exposure prophylaxis and/or treatment of disease caused by an infectious agent and which contain antigen(s) or genetic information for an antigen(s), either of biological or synthetic nature, that induce a specific immune response against the causative infectious agent(s) or its toxins (EMA 2023).
While therapeutic cancer vaccines have been under development for several decades, with Provenge becoming the first FDA-approved therapeutic cancer vaccine in 2010, the success of COVID-19 vaccines, especially mRNA-based platforms, has reinvigorated global interest in vaccine technologies. This shift has reinforced the potential of vaccines not only in disease prevention but also as a therapeutic strategy for treating cancer by stimulating the immune system to recognize and eliminate tumor cells.
Despite the progress made in novel immunotherapies, including immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs), oncolytic viruses, and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies, these approaches have demonstrated limited success in certain tumor types due to immune evasion mechanisms, tumor heterogeneity, and the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment (TME). To overcome these challenges, therapeutic cancer vaccines have emerged as a promising alternative strategy, leveraging the body’s immune system to mount targeted responses against cancer cells (Fan et al., 2023, Liu et al., 2022).