Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells Facilitate the Development and Evaluation of Cancer Vaccines

Cancer vaccines are an approach to elicit amplified antigen-specific immune responses. Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) have potential utility for the development of universal vaccines because of their intrinsic antigenic epitopes. Concurrently, iPSCs can undergo pluripotent differentiation and are thus a stable source of both antigen-presenting cells for producing immune cell-based vaccines and tumor organoids for facilitating the exploration and adaptive assessment of tumor vaccines. This review describes the specific contributions of iPSCs to vaccine development, summarizes their diverse developmental trajectories, and discusses the obstacles to their application along with potential solutions.