Is It Possible to Develop Cancer Vaccines to Neoantigens, What Are the Major Challenges, and How Can These Be Overcome?

Recent work by several groups has undoubtedly shown that we can produce cancer vaccines targeting neoantigens. However, each vaccine is essentially a single-use, patient-specific product, making this approach resource-intensive. For this reason, it is important to ask whether this approach will be any more successful than what has been attempted during the last 30 years using vaccines targeting self-epitopes. Here, we discuss what might be expected from neoantigen vaccines based on our experience in chronic viral infections, and how this new approach may be applied to cancer immunotherapy.