Prophylactic cancer vaccines

Abstract

Immunotherapy of cancer has had little impact on overall patient survival. This is largely due to the numerous mechanisms that growing tumors use to inhibit, subvert, suppress, or tolerize an effective antitumor immune responses. The importance of the immune system and vaccines as tools to strengthen it with the aim of cancer prevention has been grossly overlooked in spite of accumulating evidence that many difficulties that challenge vaccines for cancer therapy would not exist in the setting of prevention. The target of immunoprevention in early stage of disease, and preferably in premalignancy, would be cells that did not yet undergo immune selection and their microenvironment has not been shaped by a growing and evolving tumor. Several premalignant conditions have been identified and antigens that characterize premalignant disease have been characterized. This offers to date unexplored opportunity to utilize vaccines to prevent cancer.