BRIEF—Anticancer vaccines enhanced with personalization techniques

Anticancer vaccines will be revolutionized by the use of techniques that personalize them to individual patients, according to research discussed at the ESMO Immuno-Oncology Congress in Geneva.

Personalization has been made possible with next generation high-throughput sequencing, a technology which identifies mutations that are unique to a patient’s tumor.

Algorithms are used to predict which neoantigens should be targeted for vaccination. The first trials, published last year, showed that the selected targets were immunogenic, meaning that vaccination induced immune responses or amplified existing immune responses against these neoantigens.

Michal Bassani-Sternberg of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research said: "The vaccines can be now customized for each patient based on the genomic information in their tumor, and the early results are promising. The vaccines worked well with checkpoint inhibitors. We now need to see if vaccination against neoantigens leads to tumor regression in a larger cohort of patients.”