Current Developments in Actively Personalized Cancer Vaccination with a Focus on RNA as the Drug Format.

Abstract

Developments in sequencing technologies have not only led to a rapid generation of genomic and transcriptional data from cancer patients, but also revealed the vast diversity of cancer-specific changes in patient tumors. Among these, mutation changes in the protein sequence can result in novel epitopes recognized by the immune system and, therefore, can be employed in the development of personalized vaccines. Thanks to its easy design and scalable GMP production, vaccines based on mRNAs coding for mutated epitopes have emerged as a reliable strategy for the exploitation of the potential of patient-specific genomic data. In this review, we provide an overview of recent developments in actively personalized vaccinations, with a special focus on the promise of mRNA vaccines.