The Current Types of Cancer Vaccines

There are two types of vaccines: preventative and therapeutic. Most vaccines we receive during childhood are for prevention, they stimulate the immune system to make antibodies and killer cells that remember the germ’s protein ID coating. Cancer vaccines are therapeutic, designed to be given after the person becomes sick with the disease. They often don’t work well because prevention is easier than treatment, and your immune system reacts differently towards “self” than to foreign bacteria and viruses, “non-self”.

Cancer cells come from your own cells that have lost their ability to control their growth. The immune system often doesn’t see the tumor cells as dangerous, just self cells. After all, when the immune system starts attacking the body, we call it autoimmunity. So, in a sense, cancer vaccines try to teach the immune system that something it sees as harmless is really a threat.

Some cancer vaccines try to stimulate antibodies, but these are small proteins that are usually inadequate to kill a tumor cell. Most vaccines try to stimulate killer cells to attack and destroy tumor cells the same way they would kill a cell infected by a virus. This can be done in several ways: by injecting the patient with their own cancer cells, killed by radiation and mixed with immune-stimulating chemicals, by injection with protein pieces of the tumor cell (peptides), and with Dendritic Cells (DC). DC vaccines are superior in many ways in that the can stimulate killer cells directly, instead of relying on other cells to help out.