Dendritic Cell-Based Vaccines in Cancer Therapy: Focus on Melanoma, Glioblastoma, and Prostate Cancers

Abstract

Context: Despite advances in conventional cancer therapies, tumor recurrence and treatment-related toxicities remain major challenges. Dendritic cell (DC)-based vaccines have emerged as a promising immunotherapeutic approach, capable of activating tumor-specific T-cell responses across multiple malignancies, including melanoma, prostate cancer, and glioblastoma. This narrative review summarizes current evidence on dendritic cell-based immunotherapy, with a focus on clinical trials in prostate cancer, melanoma, and glioblastoma. It aims to evaluate the therapeutic potential of dendritic cell vaccines and their role in personalized and combination treatment strategies designed to overcome tumor heterogeneity and immune evasion. Evidence Acquisition: A narrative literature search was conducted in PubMed for English-language human studies published between 2000 and 2026. Search terms included "glioblastoma", "melanoma", "prostate cancer", "dendritic cells", "cancer vaccines", "immunotherapy", "Sipuleucel-T", and "BPX-101". Boolean operators (AND/OR) were used to combine the search terms. Duplicate articles and unrelated studies were excluded after review of titles and abstracts. Results: DC-based vaccines were generally safe and induced tumor-specific immune responses in melanoma, glioblastoma, and prostate cancer, although clinical outcomes were heterogeneous. In melanoma, immune activation was frequent, but the clinical benefit was limited. In glioblastoma, DCVax-L improved overall survival, whereas other approaches demonstrated immune responses without a clear survival benefit. In prostate cancer, Sipuleucel-T provided a modest survival benefit, whereas the phase III VIABLE trial (DCVAC/PCa) failed to improve overall survival. Engineered and biomaterial-based vaccine platforms showed immunogenicity but inconsistent clinical efficacy. Conclusions: Overall, dendritic cell-based vaccines, despite eliciting antitumor immune responses, have not demonstrated meaningful improvements in survival outcomes (except for Sipuleucel-T). Therefore, optimization of therapeutic strategies and the use of combination approaches appear necessary to achieve clinically significant benefits.