Personalized, multivalent, and more affordable: the globalization of vaccines. for Cancer Research

摘要

Active immunotherapy of cancer, and especially of brain tumors, has enjoyed little success thus far, although a number of approaches have been examined. These approaches rarely involved the determination of the immunologic status of a patient receiving the vaccination. More often than not, the target was a single antigen expressed in a fraction of patients and the patients were not preselected according to the antigen positivity. The procedures used to generate vaccines were laborious and expensive and failed in a vast majority of patients when the protocol required the isolation and maintenance of patients' own cancer cells. Patients with malignant gliomas, in addition to treatment that is inherently immunosuppressive, receive immunosuppressive anti- brain edema drugs; these are very unfavorable conditions for active immunotherapy. A conviction that it is possible to vaccinate against brain cancer, however, brings continuously new ideas of how to tackle an ineffective immune surveillance of solid tumors.