Development of personalized Vaccines

What are the scopes, limits, and effects of a personalized vaccine?

Sequence of steps needed to administer personalized vaccine development to effectively test and treat patient. Image provided by Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry

Introduction

Everybody’s genetic makeup is different, in turn that can lead to very different reactions happening from our body to our cells. Some individuals experience sharper side effects of vaccines while others do not, another example is an individual T and B cells may be functioning differently, important against cancer immunity. For a long time it has been believed that everybody could benefit from a vaccine, however that has turned out to be untrue as every individual has different immunologic and genetic responses. As technology and research advances, the prospect of using personalized vaccines and medications is becoming a more viable option for determining public health and safety.

What is the science behind personalized vaccines?

Personalized vaccines will be personalized based on polymorphism “x” and the haplotype “y” which are barriers to an immune response, gender as females have higher antibodies to vaccines, subpopulation level and the racial and ethnic background. Another example is when researchers at a clinical trial create personalized vaccines for 13 patients all having the rare cancer metastatic melanoma. By injecting naked mRNA intranasally, CD4+ T cells were detected against the neoepitopes the catalysts for that cancer. Following up there was a lower rate of metastatic disease measured in these patients. The development of personalized vaccines come from the array of antigens from a patient 's and using that to treat the individual and specific tumor. In fact other research has helped to develop the personalized vaccine such as targeting a patient’s own specific immunogenic neoantigens to direct their immune system to fight against the cancer cells in cancer immunotherapy.

Challenges and limitations

Concerning public health, using personalized vaccines may actually be counterintuitive to public health initiatives. Public health initiatives requiring vaccines have to minimize the barriers to create herd immunity, those barriers include scheduling appointments and physical examinations. By individualizing vaccines there needs to be more paperwork and diagnosis done on an individual and on a vaccine, which can weaken vaccine outreach. Our current model does not have personalization but vaccination rates have been the highest it has ever been. Another factor to consider is that even if there are personalized vaccines there would not be much benefit. It brings up the question if there has to be a genetic screening for all individuals to improve the immunology of the 5% of the whole population.

What is the future?

Vaccines are very effective tools to utilize to better public health, however the issue of personalized vaccines with more research has found to be more beneficial with individual cancers than disease and pandemics such as the Flu or Covid-19. For example Dr.Knutson at the Mayo Clinic cited that with analyzing cancer cells and the immune system they can create a personalized vaccine. Dr. Knutson says “We can take a small part of that cancer and sequence that cancer and get the information that we need to design the vaccine,” (Mayo Clinic). By using that vaccine, the cancer is prevented and a tumor is shrinking. With the rise of personalized vaccines come therapeutic cancer vaccines that treat existing cancer by conditioning the patient’s immune system to recognize and destroy cancer cells. In fact a new vaccine called TG4050 is being introduced that delivers 30 personalized proteins called neoantigens into a patient to activate the antitumor immune response. In fact one of the researchers Olivier Lantz, MD, PHD said that the therapeutic vaccine would “lead to strong immune responses which could eliminate any minimal residual disease that may eventually lead to disease relapse,”.  Therefore this groundbreaking technology not only cures but keeps the patient throughout their whole life eliminating any risk of the disease reviving itself.

Conclusion:

Personalized vaccines offer a promising future and a goal to improve public health and safety to the next extent. From our findings we have understood how researchers create personalized vaccines for both cancer and non cancerous diseases. Using all of the data and the arguments presented about personalized vaccines, using personalized vaccines is viable only for cancers as using it requires extra research and screening potentially tampering public health itself. Using personalized vaccines on cancers has proven to be effective for a widespread majority and is proven to reduce cancer and the risk itself furthering the prosperity and health of the worldwide population, however since this is a new field, a new advancement might change everything.