Compared to traditional ways, cancer immunotherapy is considered as a safer and more effective way to treat cancer. And vaccines play an important role in immunotherapy. Carbohydrates and glycopeptides which aberrantly expressed on tumor cell surface are considered as promising antigens for the development of tumor vaccines. Many strategies have been developed to enhance the antitumor efficiency of glycopeptides.

In our research, MUC1 glycopeptides were synthesized as the target antigens for cancer vaccines. And to improve the immunogenicity of MUC1 glycopeptides, antigens were coupled to immune-response-stimulating T-cell epitopes and the Pam3Cys lipopeptide. the result of mice vaccination showed that the three-component vaccines induced strong immune responses.¹ We introduced STING stimulator, CDG, to MUC1 glycopeptide-based cancer vaccines with both physical mixing and built-in strategies for the first time. Immunological studies revealed that activating the STING pathway by CDG enabled the MUC1 glycopeptide vaccines to elicit strong humoral and cellular responses.² To enhance NKT cells for killing cancer cells, we conjugated the potent agonist of invariant NKT cell, α-GalCer, with the MUC1 glycopeptide. High level of tumor specific IgG antibodies was elicited by immunization of vaccine candidates.³ Also, a novel DNA supramolecular hydrogel-based vaccine system was carried out. This vaccine system could efficiently recruit and activate APCs, and showed an obvious antitumor effect.⁴

Acknowledgements

These works were supported by the Major State Basic Research Development Program of China (2013CB910700) and (2012CB821600), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (21332006 and 21672126), National Key R&D Program of China