Peptide Vaccine Development for Breast Cancer

Peptide vaccines have emerged as a promising therapeutic strategy in the fight against breast cancer, leveraging the specificity and potency of immune responses against tumor-associated antigens. These vaccines consist of short sequences of amino acids that mimic epitopes on cancer cells, effectively training the immune system to recognize and attack breast cancer.

Introduction to Peptide Vaccine

Breast cancer (BC) is the most common cancer among women worldwide. Currently, cancer immunotherapy through vaccines has attracted widespread attention due to its specific and targeted immune cell activity, which can generate effective immune responses and thus provide long-lasting protection against the disease. Peptides can be easily tailored with selected epitopes to induce specific immune responses and granulated with carriers to improve their delivery, thereby overcoming their weaknesses. With advances in nanotechnology, peptide-based vaccines could be combined with other ingredients to modulate the immune system's response to BC. Peptide vaccines could become a mainstay in preventing BC and recurrence.

Fig.1 Schematic diagram of the mechanism of action of peptide vaccines. (Nordin ML, et al., 2023)

Our Services

Peptide vaccines contain epitopes that respond to T cells, and the primary goal of peptide vaccines is to induce the necessary immune response in the host. Peptide vaccines follow the principle of immunotherapy and regulate the human immune system to specifically attack cancer cells by identifying the abnormal expression of tumor antigens or proteins in cancer cells. Based on our in-depth understanding of BC biology, we focus on target selection, design and screening of epitope peptides, as well as preclinical studies on the efficacy and safety of peptide-based BC vaccines. Our expert team is confident in providing the best service for BC peptide vaccine research and development. Our development strategies include:

• Personalized peptide vaccine designed based on TAA
  Personalized peptide vaccines designed against tumor-associated antigens (TAA) are immunotherapy methods that can more quickly and effectively induce the host to produce anti-tumor immunity after vaccination.
• Personalized peptide vaccine designed based on Neoantigen
  The advantages of neoantigen vaccines compared to TAA vaccines lie in the following two points: First, neoantigens are only expressed by tumor cells, so they can trigger a true tumor-specific T cell response, thereby preventing "off-target" damage to non-malignant tissues. Secondly, neoantigens are de novo epitopes derived from somatic mutations, which makes it possible for this type of vaccine to circumvent the tolerance of T cell centers to self-epitope and thus induce their immune response against tumors.

Advantages of Peptide Vaccine

• Peptide-based vaccines can be easily customized using minimal epitopes while still being able to safely induce the desired immune response.
• Peptides are manufactured almost exclusively using synthetic chemistry, and peptide antigens can be completely and specifically identified as chemical entities.
• All problems associated with antigenic biological contamination are effectively eliminated.

Alfa Cytology is a world-leading preclinical CRO company dedicated to assisting scientists around the world in BC research. We can provide you with BC peptide vaccine development services and help in the treatment and diagnosis of BC. If you have any questions about BC research, please contact us and our experts will get back to you as soon as possible.