Cancer vaccines have long been considered a crucial tool of successful cancer immunotherapy because they are made to amplify tumor-specific T cell responses through active vaccination. Despite a clear rationale for such vaccines, significant prior attempts failed to mediate clinically significant antitumor activity in humans. The systematic discovery of tumor neoantigens has recently been made possible by advances in next-generation sequencing and novel bioinformatics tools, which have sped up the creation of a personalized cancer vaccine. However, preliminary results are not impressive. There is an urgent need to develop novel therapeutic strategies based on personalized cancer vaccines and investigate the detailed mechanisms of their antitumor effect. The treatment landscape has also been revolutionized by molecular therapeutics based on driver oncogenes, which significantly extend progression-free survival and/or overall mortality in patients with known driver gene alterations. Drug resistance, on the other hand, is unavoidable and would reduce the long-term survival advantage. Although novel molecular therapeutic drugs, which were designed to overcome drug resistance, emerge one after another, the optimal treatment strategies are controversial.

This research topic aims at publishing high-quality original research, reviews, perspective and opinion articles and unique case reports on novel therapeutic strategies based on personalized cancer vaccines and investigating the detailed mechanisms of its antitumor effect, resistance mechanisms, and optimal treatment strategies of novel molecular therapeutic drugs in cancer.

Potential topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Mechanisms of antigen-cross presentation and T cell responses to personalized cancer vaccines.

- Prophylactic and/or therapeutic strategies for personalized cancer vaccines.

- Different combination therapeutic strategies based on personalized cancer vaccines – e.g., the combination of immune checkpoint inhibitors and personalized cancer vaccines, the combination of radiotherapy and personalized cancer vaccines, etc.

- Novel primary and/or acquired drug resistance mechanisms of molecularly targeted therapies in various cancers.

- Multi-omics data on the tumor immune microenvironment could lead to the creation of prognostic and/or predictive biomarkers for molecular therapeutics in a variety of cancers.

- Different combination therapeutic strategies based on novel molecular therapeutics – e.g., the combination of immune checkpoint inhibitors and novel molecular therapeutics, etc.

- Explore the mechanisms for different combinational therapies based on personalized cancer vaccines or novel molecular therapeutics.

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Frontiers in Immunology

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