The trend in cancer treatment, and medicine in general, is leaning toward greater personalization in care. Autologous therapeutic vaccines (ATVs) are one such modality which uses the patient's own cells or tissue to create a vaccine to treat cancer. The original type of ATV was the whole-antigen ATVs (WATVs), which uses excised cancer tissue to deliver the entire complement of tumor-associated antigens as a vaccine to facilitate an immune response to better recognize and destroy tumor cells. A similar approach is used in autologous dendritic cell vaccines (ADCV). ADCV is a type of ATV different from WATV because ADCVs use tumor lysate or allogenic material incubated with dendritic cells ex vivo to train dendritic cells to recognize tumor tissue as pathogenic. The trained dendritic cells are then given as vaccine to the patient and attack the tumor.

ATVs are an important part of cancer immunotherapy. They have been studied and used clinically for the past 100 years starting with WATVs for warts and papillomas. Today, the biggest advantage to ATVs is their safety. A review of 100 years of WATV data showed no autoimmunity, very rare seeding, and very rare incidence of any serious adverse events .1 WATVs research remains active in recent clinical trials of OncoVAX, Vigil, and Reniale vaccines, which are actively being studied for colon, breast/ovarian, and renal cell carcinoma (RCC), respectively.2,3,4 Smaller clinical trials for WATV use in adult brain tumors are also still active - the latest published study being Bota 2018 using WATV in combination with other chemotherapies.5 However, there have been no trials specifically aimed toward WATV use in pediatric brain tumors . Rather, immunotherapy use in pediatric brain tumors has evolved into other, more targeted approaches. ADCV evolved from WATVs and still maintain a high degree of safety. Currently, there are no WATV or ADCV immunotherapies approved by the FDA for pediatric brain cancer. However, given their high safety profile it is important to continue to explore advancements using WATVs or ADCVs. The objective of this article is to synthesize clinical trial data of WATVs or ADCVs for pediatric brain tumors to showcase their general characteristics.