Advances in vaccines for colorectal cancer

At present, surgical resection is the only potential curative treatment for colorectal cancer, but the effect is not so good for patients with locally advanced and distant metastatic tumors. Although most primary lesions of colorectal cancer can be resected through surgery, up to 50% of it will relapse postoperatively. Chemotherapy and radiotherapy can improve overall survival and reduce recurrence rate to a certain extent, but the cumulative toxicity to human body should not be ignored. What's more, resistance to chemotherapy and radiotherapy in clinical practice occurs sometimes. Biological immunotherapy works by stimulating the specific adaptive immune response against tumor, which is non-toxic and acts as a promising treatment regimen of adjuvant therapy following traditional therapeutic approaches. Tumor vaccine, as a specific active immunotherapy strategy, shows a promising prospect in future. Here, we conduct a comprehensive review concerning the advance of vaccine for colorectal cancer in preclinical and clinical research.