Cancer Vaccines

In an ideal world, the immune system would recognize cancerous cells and eliminate them before tumor formation could take place. Unfortunately, cancer cells appear to evade the immune system despite its best efforts, and past approaches taken to stimulate the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells have not been successful. The issue for the numerous companies pursuing this approach is thus why have past efforts failed, and what can be done to increase their chances of success.

Cancer immunotherapies seek to use antigens present in or on cancer cells to alert the immune system to mount a full-scale attack - like vaccines used to prevent or treat infectious diseases. But despite the simple idea behind such approaches, no cancer vaccine has yet been approved...