title: Therapeutic cancer vaccines.
abstract: The immunological bases of current approaches to therapeutic cancer vaccination (or 'vacci-treatment') have been established for a decade or longer. The new developments lie mostly in the lessons learnt from clinical testing of these approaches. Three lessons are particularly worthy of note. First, recently completed randomized Phase 3 trials suggest that vacci-treatment with autologous dendritic cells expressing prostatic acid phosphatase (for prostate cancer) or with autologous tumor-derived heat shock protein (gp96)-peptide complexes show promise in enhancing survival of cancer patients. These two approaches are undergoing further randomized clinical testing. Second, immunological monitoring of many clinical trials has failed to identify a surrogate marker for clinical outcomes. Finally, an increasing volume of literature suggests that protective immunity to human cancers is elicited by the mutated antigenic repertoire unique to each cancer.
authors.affiliation: Center for Immunotherapy of Cancer and Infectious Diseases, Department of Immunology, University of Connecticut School of Medicine, Farmington, CT 06030-1601, USA. srivastava@nso2.uchc.edu
authors.forename: Pramod K
authors.initials: PK
authors.lastname: Srivastava
mesh_terms: D019496:Cancer Vaccines / Q000276:immunology* / Q000627:therapeutic use; D017326:Clinical Trials, Phase III as Topic; D006801:Humans; D009369:Neoplasms / Q000188:drug therapy / Q000276:immunology*
chemical_list: D019496:Cancer Vaccines