Development of personalized cancer vaccine therapy as a preventive method for recurrence after curative surgery

It is an era when all of the cancer mutations in each patient can be easily understood, and the importance of "peptide" newly generated by cancer mutation in immunotherapy of cancer has been attracted attention. Mutant peptides called "neoantigen" vary in type and number depending on individual patients, but as they ride on the surface of cancer cells on HLA, they are peptides that are not on the surface of normal cells, CTL can be regarded as an enemy and kill cancer cells. Today, clinical trials to confirm whether individualized cancer vaccine therapy using "neoantigen" is effective as a cancer treatment method or recurrence prevention method have been conducted in Europe and the United States. We will prepare the personalized cancer vaccine for intractable cancer that will recur frequently, even if it is curatively resected, such as hepatobiliary and pancreatic cancer and lung cancer, in Japan as well. We can already identify candidate neoantigen peptides that can bind to patient HLA from information of resected cancer tissue using the latest technology such as next generation sequence. From among them, we will develop a method to screen a plurality of optimal peptides to be administered, in which patient's lymphocytes responded.