Messenger RNA vaccine as cancer immunotherapy: current advances and future perspectives
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Abstract
Messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) has shown itself as a promising vaccine platform, especially after the success of the COVID-19 vaccine, developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna and approved for use in 2021. Such enthusiasm occurred because mRNA vaccines present low cost and have the possibility of rapid and large scale production, besides its capacity of encoding various different antigens. In this sense, there has been an increase in interest in the usefulness of mRNA vaccines as cancer immunotherapy, considering that there is the possibility of encoding individualized tumor antigens, which can be associated or neoantigens, that will be delivered to antigen-presenting cells (APCs), inducing humoral or cellular immune response. Thus, several research groups are developing mRNA vaccines against different cancers, in order to elaborate an effective and safe treatment for cancer patients. However, some negative points of this technique include mRNA instability, high cost for producing patient individualized antigens and the inefficient antigen delivery of naked RNA due to its low half-life in vivo, needing the help of a delivery system. In this review, we will discuss how the mRNA is made and how it activates the immune response, highlighting its advantages and disadvantages, besides its existing delivery systems, with lipid nanoparticles in focus (used in the COVID-19 vaccine) and some developing clinical trials.
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