WORLD JOURNAL OF ADVANCE
HEALTHCARE RESEARCH

Rouba Mayhoub, Usama Alanan* and Zuheir Alshehabi

ABSTRACT

Background: Cancer is defined as an abnormal growth of cells. Cancer cells are characterized by abnormal structure, functional disorder, and rapid growth compared to normal cells in the body. In recent years, significant progress has been made towards a better understanding of cancer development, which has led to significant advances in cancer treatment. Traditional cancer treatment protocols include radiotherapy, surgery, chemotherapy and proton therapy. Radiotherapy, despite its side effects, remains an important component of cancer treatment for at least 50% of all patients. On the other hand, several new strategies have emerged showing great potential in treating cancer and reducing cancer-related suffering and mortality. These include photodynamic therapy, photothermal therapy, gene therapy and nanomedicine therapy. Gene therapy consists of three different methods including immunotherapy (vaccine therapy, antibody therapy), virus therapy, and gene transfer. Cancer vaccines are designed to treat cancer by training the immune system to recognize infected cells (cancer cells). However, common vaccines are made to prevent infection of normal cells. The aim of this review is to highlight the preventive treatment of cancer with vaccines. Discussion: Cancer vaccines urge the immune system to fight cancer cells with the goal of treating the cancer or preventing it from returning after other treatments are completed. Also, some vaccines actually help to prevent some types of cancer. New antigens that arise from cancer-specific mutations represent another class of attractive antigens for therapeutic cancer vaccines. There is great interest in the development and testing of cancer vaccines that target novel antigens. Three types of vaccine platforms are being developed for the treatment of cancer: cell-based vaccines, viral vector vaccines, and molecular vaccines composed of peptides, DNA or RNA. Each of these platforms has advantages and disadvantages and is still under development: Cellular Vaccines, Peptide Vaccines, Viral Vector Vaccines, DNA Vaccines and RNA Vaccines. Conclusion: Although preventive anticancer vaccines are still under preclinical investigation, clinical translation is limited by the difficulties of antigenic and suboptimal immunogenicity predictions. The therapeutic anticancer vaccine not only needs to enhance the humoral response and CD4+ T-cell response, but also needs to activate MHCI-mediated CD+8 T-cell responses. The use of small-molecule targeting of the inflammatory signaling cascade (especially in the case of mRNA vaccines), better selection of immunogenic antibiotics, optimization of delivery systems, and selection of appropriate combination therapies will be necessary to ensure the success of anticancer NAVs in the near future.