Cancer Vaccines: Personalizing Health Interventions

Cancer is reported to become one of the leading causes of death worldwide. A number of reasons such as lack of drug efficacy, development of drug resistance and toxicity are contributing towards the development of novel therapeutic alternatives such as cancer vaccines. Tremendous improvements in our understanding of tumor immunology and availability of the state of the art proteomic technologies have made the development of therapeutic cancer vaccines, also known as personalized cancer vaccines, a reality. This new era is labeled as “vaccinomics” because it involves integration of information from newly established fields of “omics” that includes genomics, proteomics, metabolomics and high-throughput bioinformatics. Several different approaches can be explored to develop personalized therapeutic vaccines and cancer therapy, which include the use of tumor specific or associated antigens and peptides, granulocyte macrophage colony-stimulating factor, patients' own tumor cells or immune activating cells such as antigen presenting cells like dendritic cells, tumor banking, personalized tumor graft, and personalized oncology panel. These approaches have shown significant promise in various stages of clinical trials, with its share of failures. Recently, the US FDA has approved the first personalized cancer vaccine against prostate cancer; Sipuleucel-T. This has indeed opened the door for a new and exciting era of personalized cancer interventions. This review focuses on some of the most promising personalized cancer vaccine technologies and products under development and, at the same time, highlights some of the failures from which we can learn to improve the field of personalized cancer vaccine. Finally, we underscore that personalized medicine as a field will be well served by expanding its boundaries so that personalized vaccine based therapeutics can be included as a new subfield that can meaningfully benefit global public health.