Melanoma Immunotherapy: Past, Present, and Future

Abstract

The incidence of cancer and its related morbidity and mortality remain on the increase in both developing and developed countries. Cancer remains a huge burden on the health and social welfare sectors worldwide and its prevention and cure remain two golden goals that science strives to achieve. Among the treatment options for cancer that have emerged in the past 100 years, cancer vaccine immunotherapy seems to present a promising and relatively safer approach as compared to chemotherapy and radiotherapy. The identification of different tumour antigens in the last fifteen years using a variety of techniques, together with the molecular cloning of cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs)- and tumour infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs)-defined tumour antigens allowed more refining of the cancer vaccines that are currently used in different clinical trials. In a proportion of treated patients, some of these vaccines have resulted in partial or complete tumour regression, while they have increased the disease-free survival rate in others. These outcomes are more evident now in patients suffering from melanoma. This review provides an update on melanoma vaccine immunotherapy. Different cancer antigens are reviewed with a detailed description of the melanoma antigens discovered so far. The review also summarises clinical trials and individual clinical cases in which some of the old and current methods to vaccinate against or treat melanoma were used. These include vaccines made of autologous or allogenic melanoma tumour cells, melanoma peptides, recombinant bacterial or viral vectors, or dendritic cells.

Microenvironment and tumor progression of melanoma: New therapeutic prospectives

“…Various other immunomodulating strategies have been attempted for the treatment of melanomas, including vaccination with tumor cells, tumor lysate, or tumor-specific peptides, especially those derived from melanosomal antigens (Saleh et al, 2005). To date, the most novel agents for potential use in melanoma immunotherapy are monoclonal blocking antibodies (mAb) against the cytotoxic T-cell lymphocyte protein Ag-4 (CTLA-4, CD152) (Palena et al, 2006).…”

Review: Dendritic Cell-Based Vaccine in the Treatment of Patients with Advanced Melanoma

“…Following T-cell receptor (TCR) involvement, DCs and T-cells form multiple interactions, resulting in a final T-cell activation to elicit potent Ag-specific T-helper response, 24 and stimulate activation of naïve CD8 ϩ T-cells to generate cytotoxic T-lymphocyte (CTL). 25…”

Deterministic and Stochastic Model for the Role of the Immune Response Time Delay in Periodic Therapy of the Tumors

“…In what follows, we will not make a general overview of the immune system, but we will mention briefly some of its components and aspects of the dynamics which appear in our model. The cell which performs directly the tumor elimination is T-lymphocyte and it is activated by blymphocytes through the cytokines [1,2]. It is not of less importance to mention the immunodepression, a phenomenon that appears in the tumor region, when the tumor increases in size, and leads to the deactivation of the lymphocytes.…”

“…The coefficients that characterizes the rate of malignant cells are a 1 and a 2 , where a 1 is tissue dependent. On the other hand, the growth rate of lymphocytes, denoted by y (t) is described by equation (2) …”