Undefined-antigen vaccines.

Abstract

Our knowledge of the immune system and how it interacts with tumor cells continues to grow. With each advance in basic science comes a new opportunity to develop an effective treatment strategy. Many such opportunities have arisen in the past few decades and this chapter has attempted to describe how these new advances have been combined with a variety of undefined cellular antigen preparations in an attempt to develop effective cancer vaccines. None of the strategies described in this chapter have been sufficiently effective to become part of standard therapy. However, the approaches tested have generally been well-tolerated by patients with advanced cancer and the evidence of immunologic activity and examples of impressive clinical activity in a wide variety of malignancies, suggests that these strategies can be the building blocks upon which new advances are added and effective treatments developed.