Vaccines targeting tumour angiogenesis—a novel strategy for cancer immunotherapy

Aims To review the concept of tumour angiogenesis and anti-angiogenic therapy, limitations of recently used anti-angiogenic therapeutics; provide an up-to-date overview of the growing number of reports on vaccines targeting tumour angiogenesis; and finally discuss potential complications and future directions in the development of more potent and specific vaccines. Methods A literature search was carried out from PubMed for indexed articles. The most important articles were analysed and discussed. Findings The search yielded a large number of important indexed published articles that were reviewed, screened and tracked for other relevant publications. The most relevant articles, including those previously published by authors, were analysed and discussed. Conclusions Recently, different vaccine strategies have been reported to inhibit tumour growth and metastasis by induction of specific cellular and/or humoral immunity against angiogenesis-associated antigens in pre-clinical models, suggesting effective combination of anti-angiogenesis and cancer immunotherapy. Evaluation of tumour endothelial cells and clinical phase I study of the vaccines are recently ongoing, and should give us better insight into the possibilities of this novel strategy for cancer immunotherapy.