Cancer remains the major cause of mortality worldwide. Despite declining mortality rates due to early diagnosis and multiple treatment modalities, fatal recurrences are common. Among the main treatments, standard chemotherapy still induces unacceptably high toxicity, radiotherapy treatments often kill both normal tissue and tumors while stray cancer cells sometimes escape surgery. Synthetic vaccines offers an attractive alternative to overcome these problems [1]. In this context, we have designed multicomponent cyclopeptide-based constructs (Figure 1) bearing well-defined mixtures of B-cell epitopes, CD4+ and CD8+ T-cell peptide epitopes and palmitic acid as adjuvant [2]. Immunological studies in mice have revealed a spectacular increase of survival [3].
展开▼