Clinical Landscape of Therapeutic Cancer Vaccines: Challenges and Opportunities

Objective To explore the clinical landscape of therapeutic cancer vaccine and to discuss the challenges and opportunities based on the ClinicalTrial. registration platform. Methods The keyword “therapeutic cancer vaccine” was employed to retrieve relevant clinical trial information from the ClinicalTrial. registration platform. The current clinical landscape of therapeutic cancer vaccine was analyzed from the perspectives of the number of registrations, types of vaccines, indication, trial design, and geographical distribution. Results The number of clinical trials remained stable from 2002 to 2023, with an average of 70 clinical trials registered each year. Phase I accounted for 62.4% (976/1563), phase II accounted for 30.3% (474/1563) and phase III accounted for 4.4% (68/1563). The types of vaccines were mainly cell carrier vaccines and polypeptide/protein vaccines. The trial design was mainly single-arm study design and parallel control study design. The clinical trials were carried out in many regions of the world. Indications were mainly melanoma, glioblastoma, breast cancer, prostate cancer, lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, ovarian cancer and leukemia. Conclusions The research and development of therapeutic cancer vaccines is still difficult. Given the huge unmet clinical meets and the rising capacity of innovation, it is believed that therapeutic cancer vaccines contribute more to the global drug pipelines for cancer.