Vaccines and melanoma.

The potential for therapeutic efficacy of a melanoma vaccine has been evident preclinically for many years. In melanoma patients, vaccines have resulted in the induction of immune responses, although clinical benefit has not been clearly documented. The recent achievements with immune-checkpoint blockade have shown that immunotherapy can be a powerful tool in cancer therapy. With increased understanding of tumor immunity, the limitations of previous cancer vaccination approaches have become evident. Rapid progress in technologies that enable better vaccine design raise the expectation that these limitations can be overcome, thus leading to a clinically effective melanoma vaccine in the near future.