Modeling cancer vaccines

Cancer vaccine research is a hot topic for medical treatments of cancer. Identification of candidate antigenic stimuli for the vaccine is already improved using immune-informatics. Subsequent test in vivo are expensive and time consuming. There is an increasing request to a modeling approach to speed up this phase of vaccine research. In this paper we report our experience in dealing with cancer vaccine models and we will discuss two different models, SimTriplex and MetastaSim, which model the same vaccine but different scenarios. Cancer vaccine modeling is an interdisciplinary research and cannot be carried out without the contribution of all different scientific expertise. We now experience that biologists and medical doctors are progressively convinced that modeling can be of great help in understanding experimental results and planning new experiments. This will boost this research in future.