Cancer Vaccine

A cancer vaccine, or oncovaccine, is a treatment intended either to prevent cancer from developing or to treat cancer that already exists, working on the principle that the immune system normally destroys cancerous cells but that tumors can evade this natural defense. Preventive cancer vaccines are given to people with risk factors to stop cancer before it develops or to prevent its recurrence after remission, while therapeutic cancer vaccines aim to eliminate existing tumors and can be paired with more aggressive combined therapies. Most work by training antigen-presenting cells to process vaccine components into epitopes and present them to T cells, which then target cells expressing those antigens; formulations include cell-based vaccines using tumor cells or their lysates, protein or peptide-based vaccines, gene-based vaccines using DNA or RNA, and live attenuated organisms, each with distinct advantages and challenges.