Biomaterials-assisted construction of neoantigen vaccines for personalized cancer immunotherapy

ABSTRACT

Introduction

Cancer vaccine represents a promising strategy toward personalized immunotherapy, and its therapeutic potency highly relies on the specificity of tumor antigens. Among these extensively studied tumor antigens, neoantigens, a type of short synthetic peptides derived from random somatic mutations, have been shown to be able to elicit tumor-specific antitumor immune response for tumor suppression. However, challenges remain in the efficient and safe delivery of neoantigens to antigen-presenting cells inside lymph nodes for eliciting potent and sustained antitumor immune responses. The rapid advance of biomaterials including various nanomaterials, injectable hydrogels, and macroscopic scaffolds has been found to hold great promises to facilitate the construction of efficient cancer vaccines attributing to their high loading and controllable release capacities.

Areas covered

In this review, we will summarize and discuss the recent advances in the utilization of different types of biomaterials to construct neoantigen-based cancer vaccines, followed by a simple perspective on the future development of such biomaterial-assisted cancer neoantigen vaccination and personalized immunotherapy.

Expert opinion

These latest progresses in biomaterial-assisted cancer vaccinations have shown great promises in boosting substantially potentiated tumor-specific antitumor immunity to suppress tumor growth, thus preventing tumor metastasis and recurrence.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoantigen cancer vaccine
• personalized immunotherapy
• neoantigen delivery
• biomaterials

Article highlights

• A brief historical overview of tumor neoantigens and personalized cancer immunotherapy.

• The latest progresses on neoantigen cancer vaccines formulated with different types of biomaterials.

• A perspective on the future development of biomaterial-assisted neoantigen cancer vaccines.

Declaration of interest

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

Reviewer disclosures

Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (22077093), the National Research Programs from Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of China (2021YFF0701800), the Suzhou Key Laboratory of Nanotechnology and Biomedicine, the Collaborative Innovation Center of Suzhou Nano Science and Technology, and the 111 Program from the Ministry of Education of China.