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Rocket Science
Published in Norman Begg, The Remarkable Story of Vaccines, 2023
While vaccines continue to conquer infectious diseases, a whole new category of vaccines is in its infancy; therapeutic vaccines. Traditional vaccines work by preventing infectious diseases, whereas therapeutic vaccines are given to treat people who already have the disease. They work by stimulating your immune system to help you fight the disease. There are now a whole host of therapeutic vaccines at different stages of development. These vaccines don’t just target infectious diseases, they also have the potential to be used for a whole range of cancers. Therapeutic cancer vaccines contain cancer cells or cells from the immune system, which have either been taken from the person with the disease, or grown in a lab. To date there are only two approved cancer vaccines: one for prostate cancer, and one for bladder cancer (which actually uses the same components as BCG, the vaccine for tuberculosis). There are therapeutic vaccines now being developed for cancer of the cervix, breast, lung, pancreas and others. These custom-made, personalised vaccines will shape the future of cancer treatment, and have given medicine a new word: immunotherapy (also called immuno-oncology). Therapeutic vaccines for infectious diseases are being developed for those that become chronic, such as hepatitis B and HIV. Many of the therapeutic vaccines in development also rely on gene-based technology.
Vaccines Against COVID-19
Published in Hanadi Talal Ahmedah, Muhammad Riaz, Sagheer Ahmed, Marius Alexandru Moga, The Covid-19 Pandemic, 2023
Majid Khan, Muhammad Faheem, Najmur Rahman, Rizwan Ahmad, M. Zia-Ul-Haq, Muhammad Ria
Vaccine is a crucial strategy for preventing infectious diseases as they are economical and decreases morbidity and mortality without prolonging effects. Prophylactic and therapeutic vaccines are the meaningful way to protect and provide quality health globally [15]. WHO has identified more than 184 promising vaccines candidates against COVID-19 in the pre-clinical stage and 102 in the clinical with an almost 8 vaccines approved for full use until May 2021 [18, 26].
Antiviral Drugs as Tools for Nanomedicine
Published in Devarajan Thangadurai, Saher Islam, Charles Oluwaseun Adetunji, Viral and Antiviral Nanomaterials, 2022
Currently, preventative vaccines are being developed using weakened or harmless virus forms to impart and invoke the immune system, which can then recognise and fight with the potential threats. These therapeutic vaccines compel the immune system to attack cancer cells. Four vaccines have been designed to treat or prevent cancer:Sipuleucel-T: The first therapeutic cancer vaccine that received the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for treatment of some forms of prostrate cancer. It uses a patient’s re-engineered cells, which are then injected back into the body to help activate the immune system.Bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG): It is widely used as a preventative vaccine for tuberculosis, but also used as a therapeutic vaccine to treat very early stages of bladder cancer.Hepatitis B vaccine (HBV): HBV became the first FDA-approved vaccine to prevent cancer. Children receive the HBV vaccine soon after birth to prevent liver cancer, as recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine: These are the preventive vaccines designed for protection against infections from HPV strains responsible for many cancers.
Arsenic trioxide as an inducer of immunogenic cell death
Published in OncoImmunology, 2023
Oliver Kepp, Hui Pan, Peng Liu, Guido Kroemer
Altogether, the aforementioned data support the idea that ATO, which is likely the first antineoplastic chemotherapy that was used in the world (in particular in China), can stimulate several facets of ICD. Importantly, ATO activates a mixed pattern of stress and death pathways, many of which contribute to the immunogenic effects of ATO-treated cancer cells (Figure 1). Future studies must explore the possibility that such a pleiotropic pattern of ICD might be more efficient in yielding therapeutic cancer vaccines than ICD relying on single or dual-cell stress/death subroutine(s). In other words, would a mixture of four stress/death pathways (autophagy, apoptosis, ferroptosis, and necroptosis) generate a more efficient ICD-based vaccine that only involves one or combinations of two or three pathways? The answer to this question will have implications for the future clinical development of therapeutic vaccines.
HIV-1 therapeutic vaccines in clinical development to intensify or replace antiretroviral therapy: the promising results of the Tat vaccine
Published in Expert Review of Vaccines, 2022
Aurelio Cafaro, Barbara Ensoli
The development of a therapeutic HIV/AIDS vaccine faces obstacles, the most important being how to measure vaccine efficacy. Immune correlates of virus control are still lacking, and vaccinees must undergo analytical treatment interruptions (ATI), i.e. to pause ART for a defined time interval (generally 8–12 weeks), to verify whether post-treatment control (PTC) has been achieved. This is further complicated by the observation that PTC may occur after an initial phase of virus reactivation and plasma viremia rebound, which may actually be beneficial, as it can boost the vaccine-induced immune response and lead to PTC. However, to keep a vaccinee off-therapy despite viral rebound raises ethical concerns, and presently there is no consensus on when to resume cART upon virus rebound, i.e. what is the plasma viral load (pVL) threshold beyond which it is recommended to reinitiate cART, and, for vaccinees with pVL below the threshold, for how long they can be kept on ATI [28]. On the one hand, to be very conservative and reinitiate cART as soon as pVL rebounds may hamper the recognition of an effective vaccine strategy, on the other hand, delaying therapy resumption may be detrimental to the vaccinee and favor the occurrence of drug-resistant variants [29]. Furthermore, PTC may also occur in a small proportion (<10%) of nonvaccinated individuals, complicating the assessment of vaccine efficacy [19]. Thus, novel concepts are needed to assess therapeutic vaccine efficacy both safely and efficiently [30].
Plant-made vaccines against parasites: bioinspired perspectives to fight against Chagas disease
Published in Expert Review of Vaccines, 2021
Abel Ramos-Vega, Elizabeth Monreal-Escalante, Eric Dumonteil, Bernardo Bañuelos-Hernández, Carlos Angulo
Antiparasitic drugs have been used to combat these NTD including Chagas disease, but low effectiveness has been observed in some infection stages [12,82] and reported drug resistance [83]. For these reasons, the need for affordable effective prophylactic and therapeutic vaccines becomes evident. Mosquirix™ (RTS,S/AS01) is the unique available antiparasitic vaccine developed by GlaxoSmithKline Inc. (GSK, Brentford, UK) in collaboration with the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative tested in phase 3 clinical trials and evaluated in endemic regions to fight against malaria [84]. One of the reasons for the lack of more commercial antiparasitic vaccines could be low profitability for the pharmaceutical industry [85]. Consequently, research is crucial to generate inexpensive vaccines. In new biotechnological advances, plants as low-cost cell factories have opened novel avenues to develop affordable vaccines against parasitic diseases, such as malaria, leishmaniasis, toxoplasmosis, among others [86]. The low-cost of plant-made vaccine technology represents a great opportunity for governments from poor- or middle-income countries that have serious parasitic disease problems but are not attended by the pharmaceutical industry.