Microorganisms-derived antigens for preventive anti-cancer vaccines

Cancer prevention is one of the aim with the highest priority in order to reduce the burden of cancer diagnosis and treatment on individuals as well as on healthcare systems.

To this aim, vaccines represent the most efficient primary cancer prevention strategy. Indeed, anti-cancer immunological memory elicited by preventive vaccines might promptly expand and prevent tumor from progressing.

Antigens derived from microorganisms (MoAs), represent the obvious target for developing highly effective preventive vaccines for virus-induced cancers. In this respect, the drastic reduction in cancer incidence following HBV and HPV preventive vaccines are the paradigmatic example of such evidence. More recently, experimental evidences suggest that MoAs may represent a “natural” anti-cancer preventive vaccination or can be exploited for developing vaccines to prevent cancers presenting highly homologous tumor-associated antigens (TAAs) (e.g. molecular mimicry).

The present review describes the different preventive anti-cancer vaccines based on antigens derived from pathogens at the different stages of development.