Table 1.

Vaccination strategies: advantages versus disadvantages

Vaccination strategy	Advantages	Disadvantages
Whole tumor cells	Complete Ag pool of an individual tumor (including Ags that have not been identified yet)	Must be made individually for each patient
	Activation of a polyclonal and more effective immune response	Lack of co-stimulatory molecules on solid tumor cells
	The immune system rather than the vaccinologist selects the most immunogenic tumor-specific Ags	Immune response difficult to monitor
		Induction of auto-immunity in the presence of adjuvant
Dendritic cells (DCs)	Presentation of the vaccine Ags to other cell types of the immune system	Must be made individually for each patient
	Expression of high levels of HLA complexes and co-stimulatory molecules	Generation of DCs technically challenging
	Stimulation of both naive and memory T cells	Money- and time-consuming treatment
DNA	Easy and cheap to produce and purify	DNA integration into the cell genome potentially promoting malignancy
	Require no special handling or storage conditions	Less effective than peptide vaccines in inducing CD8+ T cell response
	Elicitation of both CD8+ and CD4+ immune responses as well as humoral responses
Peptides	Easy to manufacture	Immune response limited to one or few epitopes
	Strong CD8+ T cell response	HLA restriction
	Known sequence and biochemistry	Degradation in the absence of adjuvant
	Allow specific monitoring of the patient’s immune response
Anti-idiotypic antibodies	Unrestricted HLA population	Human anti-mouse antibody response
	Allow effective vaccination against non-protein Ags and poorly immunogenic Ags
	Elicit both humoral and cellular immune response