New cancer vaccine design brings new dawn of treatment

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In recent years, with the continuous development of cancer immunotherapy, more and more scientific research teams have begun to focus on cancer vaccines. Cancer vaccines (CV), a therapeutic and preventive immunotherapy strategy that utilizes tumor cell-associated antigens to activate the human immune system and exert specific anti-tumor effects.

While many related agents show promising signs of immunogenicity, most therapeutic CV clinical trials have yielded unsatisfactory results. At present, some of the cancer vaccines we are familiar with are preventive vaccines, such as the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine to prevent cervical cancer. For a world that still talks about cancer today, therapeutic cancer vaccines are crucial.

Currently, therapeutic cancer vaccines mainly rely on important histocompatibility complexes to present antigen proteins to T cells to play a role in targeting viral antigens, and each tumor patient has different antigen presentation characteristics and immune activation capabilities. In addition, tumors can evade immune attack by mutating proteins on their surfaces, reducing the effectiveness of vaccines. All these have increased the difficulty of developing therapeutic cancer vaccines.

Recently, "Nature" has brought a newly designed cancer vaccine for two types of surface proteins, MICA and MICB (MICA/B), which can induce different T cells and natural killer cells to carry out a coordinated attack and play a wider role. Immune Function.

When the human body is subjected to excessive DNA damage due to cancer, two types of stress proteins, MICA and MICB (MICA/B), are produced in large quantities, but these two proteins are hardly detected in healthy cells, which determines their tumor specificity. . In addition, they were able to activate ligands for T cells and natural killer cells (NK cells), accelerating the immune system to destroy tumors.

Cancer cells, however, cleaves MICA/B through proteolytic processes, reducing their likelihood of activating immune cells and thus evading immune attack. However, the new vaccine can prevent the cleavage of MICA/B by tumors and increase the level of MICA/B protein on the tumor surface. Moreover, this process can also activate dendritic cells to present tumor antigens to T cells and enhance the cytotoxicity of NK cells.

We have entered a new stage of cancer immunotherapy, and the development of cancer vaccine is destined to become a milestone event in the history of cancer treatment. In the future, we hope that the vaccine can bring more benefits to mankind.