Therapeutic Vaccines and Cancer Immunotherapy

Dear Colleagues,

In this Special Issue of Vaccines, we will focus on strategies based on cancer vaccines, either as single agent treatments or combined with other therapeutic cancer treatments. A multitude of cancer vaccines have shown promising results in preclinical studies, but so far only one cancer vaccine is FDA approved. This is remarkable given the fact that in general antigen-specific immune cells are elicited, also in clinical trials. One can envision several reasons for the somewhat limiting clinical results. Reasons that put forward new challenges to achieve clinical effective therapeutic cancer vaccines. First, limited clinical responses may be due to insufficient or inappropriate activation of antigen-specific immune effector cells in cancer patients due to immune tolerance and immune suppression. Second, therapeutic efficacy might be hampered by the immune suppressive microenvironment in the tumor. Immune-effector cells may either be unable to accumulate into tumors or are inactivated rapidly upon infiltrating into a tumor. Thus, research on further improvements to pre-emptively increase the chance of therapeutic efficacy of cancer vaccines in the clinic is still essential.

It is becoming increasingly more apparent that, as part of the design of vaccine regimens, combination therapy might be a better treatment option compared to monotherapy for durable clinical responses. Combination regimens currently being explored include differing immunotherapeutic approaches including vaccines combined with conventional chemotherapy and radiation therapy. A more in-depth understanding on effects of dosing and scheduling of these treatments is required for a rational design of therapeutic combinations. In addition, especially in this era of check-point blockade immunotherapy and targeted therapies, cancer vaccines are regaining major clinical interest, as induction and/or expansion of tumor-specific immune effector cells will be vital to further enhance and broaden the efficacy and applicability of these forms of cancer immunotherapies.

In this Special Issue, we hope to provide an overview on novel or optimized cancer vaccines and rational combination therapies that aim to further enhance numbers, activity and recruitment of immune effector cells in the tumor microenvironment.

Prof. Dr. C.A.H.H. (Toos) Daemen
Guest Editor

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