Abstract
The field of cancer vaccines is currently in an active state of clinical investigation. Human papilloma virus vaccine has been approved as a prophylactic cancer vaccine, while Oncophage (heat shoch protein-peptide complex) was recently approved in Russia for a certain stage of kidney cancer, although to date none has been approved in Japan or the USA. We reviewed recent clinical trials of several different types of cancer vaccine. There have been slow but substantial advances in peptide vaccines and dendritic cell-based vaccines with regard to both clinical response and immunological markers.
A personalized approach to boost immune responses, the addition of chemotherapy to overcome robust cancer and the changing of endpoints from tumor reduction to overall survival seem to be the three key elements for the development of the therapeutic cancer vaccines. Therapeutic cancer vaccine therapy has undergone wide clinical trials for urological cancer, and it is expected to become the fourth therapeutic method following surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy.
