肿瘤糖疫苗的研究进展

肿瘤细胞表面异常表达的糖抗原为肿瘤糖疫苗的研究提供了合适的靶标, 然而由于这些糖抗原的免疫原性较差, 这又给糖疫苗的发展带来了很大的困难。本文概述了近年来科学工作者在提高肿瘤糖疫苗的免疫原性方面所做的努力: 半合成的肿瘤糖疫苗将糖抗原与蛋白共价连接, 已经有很多疫苗进入了临床试验; 随后发展的全合成的肿瘤糖疫苗将糖抗原、T细胞表位和内源性佐剂共价连接, 使疫苗的结构和组成更加确定; 基于细胞代谢糖工程的肿瘤糖疫苗将非天然的糖疫苗与细胞表面代谢糖工程相结合, 得到了强烈的免疫应答; 某些基于天然糖抗原结构修饰的疫苗产生的抗体也可以与天然糖抗原发生交叉反应, 这为肿瘤糖疫苗的发展提供了新的方向。

Recent advance in carbohydrate-based cancer vaccines

The abnormal glycans expressing on the surface of tumor cells are good targets to develop carbo-hydrate-based anti-cancer vaccines.However,one of the major problems is that carbohydrate antigens possess weak immunogenicity.This review summarizes the recent efforts to overcome this problem:glycoconjugates produced by coupling the carbohydrate antigens and proper carrier proteins improve their immunogenicity,many glycoconjugates have entered clinical trials;the vaccines become chemically well-defined when coupling the carbohydrate antigens with a T-cell peptide epitope and an immunostimulant to form fully synthetic multi-component glycoconjugate vaccines;the modification of carbohydrate antigens in combination with the technology of metabolic oligosaccharide engineering of tumor cells induces a strong immune response;and the fact that the antibodies elicited against the unnatural carbohydrate antigens can recognize the native carbohydrate antigens on tumor cells provides a new promising strategy for the development of anti-cancer vaccines.