GM-CSF elicits antibodies to tumor-associated proteins when used as a prostate cancer vaccine adjuvant

Advances in therapeutic cancer vaccines: Harnessing immune adjuvants for enhanced efficacy and future perspectives

Preventive cancer vaccines are highly effective in preventing viral infection-induced cancer, but advances in therapeutic cancer vaccines with a focus on eliminating cancer cells through immunotherapy are limited. To develop therapeutic cancer vaccines, the integration of optimal adjuvants is a potential strategy to enhance or complement existing therapeutic approaches. However, conventional adjuvants do not satisfy the criteria of clinical trials for therapeutic cancer vaccines. To improve the effects of adjuvants in therapeutic cancer vaccines, effective vaccination strategies must be formulated and novel adjuvants must be identified. This review offers an overview of the current advancements in therapeutic cancer vaccines and highlights in situ vaccination approaches that can be synergistically combined with other immunotherapies by harnessing the adjuvant effects. Additionally, the refinement of adjuvant systems using cutting-edge technologies and the elucidation of molecular mechanisms underlying immunogenic cell death to facilitate the development of innovative adjuvants have been discussed.

Advances in bio-immunotherapy for castration-resistant prostate cancer

Prostate cancer is one of the significant diseases that threaten the survival of men worldwide, with the progression of androgen deprivation therapy, become much rely on it, finally, developed into castration-resistant prostate cancer (ADT). In western countries, ranks second in incidence, and in China, with increasing lifespan, the incidence of prostate cancer is rising steadily. Although chemotherapy agents, such as taxane, have achieved some efficacy, treatment failure still occur. As sensitivity of hormone levels change, the disease can progress to castrate-resistant prostate cancer. Because of the poor efficacy of traditional surgery, endocrine therapy, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy, the treatment options for castrate-resistant prostate cancer are limited. Advanced prostate cancer can progress on immunotherapy, and thus, bio -immunotherapy targeting the unique, prostate microenvironment is an important option. In this paper, we systematically revealed the role of three types of bio-immunotherapies (immune checkpoint inhibitors, tumors, vaccines, cytokines) in castrate-resistant prostate cancer, providing a reference for clinical treatment of prostate cancer.

Engineering a versatile and retrievable cell macroencapsulation device for the delivery of therapeutic proteins

Encapsulated cell therapy holds a great potential to deliver sustained levels of highly potent therapeutic proteins to patients and improve chronic disease management. A versatile encapsulation device that is biocompatible, scalable, and easy to administer, retrieve, or replace has yet to be validated for clinical applications. Here, we report on a cargo-agnostic, macroencapsulation device with optimized features for protein delivery. It is compatible with adherent and suspension cells, and can be administered and retrieved without burdensome surgical procedures. We characterized its biocompatibility and showed that different cell lines producing different therapeutic proteins can be combined in the device. We demonstrated the ability of cytokine-secreting cells encapsulated in our device and implanted in human skin to mobilize and activate antigen-presenting cells, which could potentially serve as an effective adjuvant strategy in cancer immunization therapies. We believe that our device may contribute to cell therapies for cancer, metabolic disorders, and protein-deficient diseases.

Ranking Antibody Binding Epitopes and Proteins Across Samples from Whole Proteome Tiled Linear Peptides

Ultradense peptide binding arrays that can probe millions of linear peptides comprising the entire proteomes or immunomes of human or mouse, or numerous microbes, are powerful tools for studying the abundance of different antibody repertoire in serum samples to understand adaptive immune responses. There are few statistical analysis tools for exploring high-dimensional, significant and reproducible antibody targets for ultradense peptide binding arrays at the linear peptide, epitope (grouping of adjacent peptides), and protein level across multiple samples/subjects (I.e. epitope spread or immunogenic regions within each protein) for understanding the heterogeneity of immune responses. We developed HERON (Hierarchical antibody binding Epitopes and pROteins from liNear peptides), an R package, which allows users to identify immunogenic epitopes using meta-analyses and spatial clustering techniques to explore antibody targets at various resolution and confidence levels, that can be found consistently across a specified number of samples through the entire proteome to study antibody responses for diagnostics or treatment. Our approach estimates significance values at the linear peptide (probe), epitope, and protein level to identify top candidates for validation. We test the performance of predictions on all three levels using correlation between technical replicates and comparison of epitope calls on 2 datasets, which shows HERON's competitiveness in estimating false discovery rates and finding general and sample-level regions of interest for antibody binding. The code is available as an R package downloadable from http://github.com/Ong-Research/HERON.

GM-CSF: A Double-Edged Sword in Cancer Immunotherapy

Granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) is a cytokine that drives the generation of myeloid cell subsets including neutrophils, monocytes, macrophages, and dendritic cells in response to stress, infections, and cancers. By modulating the functions of innate immune cells that serve as a bridge to activate adaptive immune responses, GM-CSF globally impacts host immune surveillance under pathologic conditions. As with other soluble mediators of immunity, too much or too little GM-CSF has been found to promote cancer aggressiveness. While too little GM-CSF prevents the appropriate production of innate immune cells and subsequent activation of adaptive anti-cancer immune responses, too much of GM-CSF can exhaust immune cells and promote cancer growth. The consequences of GM-CSF signaling in cancer progression are a function of the levels of GM-CSF, the cancer type, and the tumor microenvironment. In this review, we first discuss the secretion of GM-CSF, signaling downstream of the GM-CSF receptor, and GM-CSF’s role in modulating myeloid cell homeostasis. We then outline GM-CSF’s anti-tumorigenic and pro-tumorigenic effects both on the malignant cells and on the non-malignant immune and other cells in the tumor microenvironment. We provide examples of current clinical and preclinical strategies that harness GM-CSF’s anti-cancer potential while minimizing its deleterious effects. We describe the challenges in achieving the Goldilocks effect during administration of GM-CSF-based therapies to patients with cancer. Finally, we provide insights into how technologies that map the immune microenvironment spatially and temporally may be leveraged to intelligently harness GM-CSF for treatment of malignancies.