MedScience

mRNA vaccines in cancer immunotherapy: recent advances and future outlook for solid tumors and blood cancers

Updated

Abstract

mRNA vaccines may enhance cancer treatment by encoding antigens and modulating immune responses.

  • Synthetic mRNA engineering involves optimizing structural elements, modifying nucleosides, and adjusting codon usage to enhance stability and translation efficiency.
  • Diverse antigen strategies include tumor-associated antigens, neoantigens, and cryptic antigens derived from aberrant splicing variants.
  • Lipid nanoparticles and dendritic cell-based systems are explored as delivery platforms to improve mRNA biodistribution and immune activation.
  • mRNA vaccines can stimulate antitumor responses by encoding specific antigens and supporting adoptive T cell therapies.
  • Combining mRNA vaccines with immune checkpoint inhibitors shows promise for treating various solid tumors and hematologic malignancies.
  • Innovations such as targeted lipid nanoparticle platforms and AI-assisted vaccine design may further advance mRNA technology in cancer immunotherapy.

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Full Text

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Funding

Competing interests

Compliance with ethics guidelines. Conflicts of interest Niu Qiao, Jing-Xian Chen, Yan Liu, and Zhu Chen declare no competing interests. Sai-Juan Chen is the Editor-in-Chief of MedScience and was excluded from peer review and all editorial decisions related to the acceptance and publication of this article. Peer review was handled independently by other editors to minimize bias. This manuscript is a review article and does not involve a research protocol requiring approval by the relevant institutional review board or ethics committee.
PubMed

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