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Vaccines
Special Issues
Personalised Cancer Vaccines
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Personalised Cancer Vaccines

A special issue of Vaccines (ISSN 2076-393X). This special issue belongs to the section "Vaccination Against Cancer and Chronic Diseases".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 October 2025 | Viewed by 2920

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Andrew L. Coveler

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Medical Oncology Unit, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, WA, USA
Interests: pancreatic cancer; anal cancer; GI cancer; cancer vaccine; chemotherapy, adjuvant therapy

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Personalized mRNA cancer vaccines are a form of immunotherapy treatment that is currently being tested in clinical trials. They are tailored to each person's cancer and work by training the immune system to recognize, destroy, and prevent the spread of cancer cells. In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in personalized cancer vaccines, primarily due to the use of innovative technologies to identify neoantigens and novel vaccine delivery platforms. There is currently one therapeutic cancer vaccine, namely sipuleucel-T (Provenge); this is a dendritic cell-based vaccine utilized for the treatment of castration-resistant prostate cancer. Personalized immunotherapy offers a means of enhancing these therapies, with dendritic cells being pulsed with specific neoantigens for a personalized immunotherapy that matches neoantigens on the surface of cancer cells with those of the vaccine components in each patient. In addition, these cancer vaccines may be combined with other immunotherapies.  mRNA- and DNA-based vaccines present an additional opportunity for cancer therapeutics, and modified viral and peptide vaccines are also being investigated. Next-generation sequencing and molecular profiling, in combination with the ability to computationally predict antigens and proteins, allows one to create cancer vaccines. In this Special Issue, novel cancer vaccines, adjuvants, and therapeutics will be examined, with regard to their regulation and treatment of disease. Cancer vaccines are coming.

Dr. Andrew L. Coveler
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Vaccines is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • peptide vaccines
  • mRNA vaccines
  • DNA vaccines
  • cancer vaccines

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

15 pages, 1636 KiB  
Article
The Immunoproteasome Is Expressed but Dispensable for a Leukemia Infected Cell Vaccine
by Delphine Béland, Victor Mullins-Dansereau, Karen Geoffroy, Mélissa Viens, Kim Leclerc Desaulniers and Marie-Claude Bourgeois-Daigneault
Vaccines 2025, 13(8), 835; https://doi.org/10.3390/vaccines13080835 - 5 Aug 2025
Viewed by 980
Abstract
Background/Objectives: Leukemia is associated with high recurrence rates and cancer vaccines are emerging as a promising immunotherapy against the disease. Here, we investigate the mechanism of action by which a personalized vaccine made from leukemia cells infected with an oncolytic virus (ICV) induces [...] Read more.
Background/Objectives: Leukemia is associated with high recurrence rates and cancer vaccines are emerging as a promising immunotherapy against the disease. Here, we investigate the mechanism of action by which a personalized vaccine made from leukemia cells infected with an oncolytic virus (ICV) induces anti-tumor immunity. Methods: Using the L1210 murine model, leukemia cells were infected and irradiated to create the ICV. The CRISPR-Cas9 system was used to engineer knockout cells to test in treatment efficacy studies. Results: We found that pro-inflammatory interferons (IFNs) that are produced by infected vaccine cells induce the immunoproteasome (ImP), a specialized proteasome subtype that is found in immune cells. Interestingly, we show that while a vaccine using the oncolytic vesicular stomatitis virus (oVSV) completely protects against tumor challenge, the wild-type (wt) virus, which does not induce the ImP, is not as effective. To delineate the contribution of the ImP for vaccine efficacy, we generated ImP-knockout cell lines and found no differences in treatment efficacy compared to wild-type cells. Furthermore, an ICV using another murine leukemia model that expresses the ImP only when infected by an IFN gamma-encoding variant of the virus demonstrated similar efficacy as the parental virus. Conclusions: Taken together, our data show that ImP expression by vaccine cells was not required for the efficacy of leukemia ICVs. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Personalised Cancer Vaccines)
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19 pages, 1427 KiB  
Article
Citrullinated ENO1 Vaccine Enhances PD-1 Blockade in Mice Implanted with Murine Triple-Negative Breast Cancer Cells
by Ricardo A. León-Letelier, Alejandro M. Sevillano-Mantas, Yihui Chen, Soyoung Park, Jody Vykoukal, Johannes F. Fahrmann, Edwin J. Ostrin, Candace Garrett, Rongzhang Dou, Yining Cai, Fu-Chung Hsiao, Jennifer B. Dennison, Eduardo Vilar, Banu K. Arun, Samir Hanash and Hiroyuki Katayama
Vaccines 2025, 13(6), 629; https://doi.org/10.3390/vaccines13060629 - 11 Jun 2025
Viewed by 1224
Abstract
Background/Objectives:Cancer vaccine targets mostly include mutations and overexpressed proteins. However, cancer-associated post-translational modifications (PTMs) may also induce immune responses. Previously, our group established the enzyme protein arginine deiminase type-2 (PADI2), which catalyzes citrullination modification, is highly expressed in triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), [...] Read more.
Background/Objectives:Cancer vaccine targets mostly include mutations and overexpressed proteins. However, cancer-associated post-translational modifications (PTMs) may also induce immune responses. Previously, our group established the enzyme protein arginine deiminase type-2 (PADI2), which catalyzes citrullination modification, is highly expressed in triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), promoting antigenicity. Methods: Here, we show the workflow of designing citrullinated enolase 1 (citENO1) vaccine peptides identified from breast cancer cells by mass spectrometry and demonstrate TNBC vaccine efficacy in the mouse model. Immunized mice with citENO1 peptides or the corresponding unmodified peptides, plus Poly I:C as an adjuvant, were orthotopically implanted with a TNBC murine cell line. Results: Vaccination with citENO1, but not unmodified ENO1 (umENO1), induced a greater percentage of activated CD8+ PD-1+ T cells and effector memory T cells in skin-draining lymph nodes (SDLNs). Remarkably, the citENO1 vaccine delayed tumor growth and prolonged overall survival, which was further enhanced by PD-1 blockade. Conclusions: Our data suggest that cancer-restricted post-translational modifications provide a source of vaccines that induce an anti-cancer immune response. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Personalised Cancer Vaccines)
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