Purpose of review: Vaccination against cancer has had a variable history, with claims of success often fading into disappointment. The reasons for this include poor vaccine design, inadequate understanding of the nature of the immune response, and a lack of objective measures to evaluate performance. The impact of genetic technology has changed everything. We now have multiple strategies to identify candidate tumor antigens, and we understand more about activation and regulation of immunity against cancer. There are novel vaccine strategies to activate specific attack on tumor cells. We also have modern assays using surrogate markers of performance to correlate with clinical effects. It is timely to select significant relevant papers to illustrate the growing potential for patients with cancer.
Recent findings: Recent findings include tumor antigen discovery and vaccine formulation, relevant knowledge concerning mechanisms of induction of effective immunity from preclinical models, and translation into clinical trials with objective evaluation of performance.
Summary: The ability of the immune response to dispose of cancer cells is clear. Passive transfer of antibody or immune cells is already clinically successful. We are now in a position to harness new gene-based information to design vaccines capable of inducing effective and long-lasting immunity. Safe vaccines could be used either in patients or in transplant donors. Pilot clinical trials are the means of testing performance, with continuing vaccine design modification to target specific antigens in different cancers.