Present status and future perspective of peptide-based vaccine therapy for urological cancer.

The use of peptide-based vaccines as therapeutics aims to elicit immune responses through antigenic epitopes derived from tumor antigens. Peptide-based vaccines are easily synthesized and the lack of significant side effects when administered in-vivo. Peptide-based vaccine therapy against several cancers including urological cancers had made progress for several decades, but there is no approval peptide vaccine all over the world. Peptides vaccines were also shown to induce a high frequency of immune response in patients who were accompanied by clinical efficacy. These data are discussed at the light of recent progression of immunotherapy caused by the addition of immune check-point inhibitors thus providing a general picture of the potential therapeutic efficacy of the peptide-based vaccines and their combination with other biological agents. In this review, we discuss mechanism of anti-tumor effect by peptide-based vaccine therapy, development of our peptide vaccine, recent clinical trials using peptide vaccine for urological cancers, and perspective of peptide-based vaccine therapy. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.