Teaching the immune system to destroy cancer and prevent its re-emergence through vaccination strategies has long been pursued as an attractive therapeutic concept, but the success of such approaches lags far behind their promise. Now, reporting in Nature Medicine, Overwijk and colleagues show that the widespread use of incomplete Freud's adjuvant (IFA) in vaccination protocols might be to blame. IFA is a mineral-oil-based adjuvant that has been used in almost 100 completed clinical cancer vaccine trials so far, and is thought to boost and maintain antitumour responses by creating persistent inflammatory vaccine depots that slowly release antigen. However, the nature of the IFA-induced CD8+ T cell responses, which are crucial for cancer eradication, is poorly understood.
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