Live-Attenuated Bacterial Vectors for Delivery of Mucosal Vaccines, DNA Vaccines, and Cancer Immunotherapy

Immunotherapeutic approaches for HPV-caused cervical cancer

Cervical cancer, the fourth most frequent women cancer worldwide, is mostly (about 99%) associated with human papillomavirus (HPV). Despite availability of three effective prophylactic vaccines for more than one decade and some other preventive measures, it is still the fourth cause of cancer death among women globally. Thus, development of therapeutic vaccines seems essential, which has been vastly studied using different vaccine platforms. Even with very wide efforts during the past years, no therapeutic vaccine has been approved yet, which might be partly due to the complex events and interactions taken place in the tumor microenvironment. On the other hand, immunotherapy has opened its way into the management plans of some cancers. The recent approval of pembrolizumab for the treatment of metastatic/recurrent cervical cancer brings new hopes to the management of this disease, while some other immunotherapeutic approaches are also under investigation either alone or in combination with vaccines. Here, following a summary about HPV and its pathogenesis, cervical cancer therapeutic vaccines would be reviewed. Cell-based vaccines as well as immunomodulation and other modalities used along with vaccines would be also discussed.

Personalized Immunotherapy in Colorectal Cancers: Where Do We Stand?

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the second leading cause of cancer death in the world. Immunotherapy using monoclonal antibodies, immune-checkpoint inhibitors, adoptive cell therapy, and cancer vaccines has raised great hopes for treating poor prognosis metastatic CRCs that are resistant to the conventional therapies. However, high inter-tumor and intra-tumor heterogeneity hinder the success of immunotherapy in CRC. Patients with a similar tumor phenotype respond differently to the same immunotherapy regimen. Mutation-based classification, molecular subtyping, and immunoscoring of CRCs facilitated the multi-aspect grouping of CRC patients and improved immunotherapy. Personalized immunotherapy using tumor-specific neoantigens provides the opportunity to consider each patient as an independent group deserving of individualized immunotherapy. In the recent decade, the development of sequencing and multi-omics techniques has helped us classify patients more precisely. The expansion of such advanced techniques along with the neoantigen-based immunotherapy could herald a new era in treating heterogeneous tumors such as CRC. In this review article, we provided the latest findings in immunotherapy of CRC. We elaborated on the heterogeneity of CRC patients as a bottleneck of CRC immunotherapy and reviewed the latest advances in personalized immunotherapy to overcome CRC heterogeneity.