title: Therapeutic cancer vaccines and combination immunotherapies involving vaccination.
abstract: Recent US Food and Drug Administration approvals of Provenge(®) (sipuleucel-T) as the first cell-based cancer therapeutic factor and ipilimumab (Yervoy(®)/anticytotoxic T-lymphocyte antigen-4) as the first "checkpoint blocker" highlight recent advances in cancer immunotherapy. Positive results of the clinical trials evaluating additional checkpoint blocking agents (blockade of programmed death [PD]-1, and its ligands, PD-1 ligand 1 and 2) and of several types of cancer vaccines suggest that cancer immunotherapy may soon enter the center stage of comprehensive cancer care, supplementing surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. This review discusses the current status of the clinical evaluation of different classes of therapeutic cancer vaccines and possible avenues for future development, focusing on enhancing the magnitude and quality of cancer-specific immunity by either the functional reprogramming of patients' endogenous dendritic cells or the use of ex vivo-manipulated dendritic cells as autologous cellular transplants. This review further discusses the available strategies aimed at promoting the entry of vaccination-induced T-cells into tumor tissues and prolonging their local antitumor activity. Finally, the recent improvements to the above three modalities for cancer immunotherapy (inducing tumor-specific T-cells, prolonging their persistence and functionality, and enhancing tumor homing of effector T-cells) and rationale for their combined application in order to achieve clinically effective anticancer responses are addressed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Surgery, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
authors.forename: Trang
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Nguyen
authors.affiliation: Department of Surgery, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
authors.forename: Julie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Urban
authors.affiliation: Department of Surgery, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA; Department of Immunology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA; Department of Microbiology and Infectious Disease, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA; Department of Bioengineering, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA; University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
authors.forename: Pawel
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Kalinski
keywords: cancer; immunotherapy; vaccines