Comments

On cancer vaccines, this information is at best years old if not decades out of date. I work in a lab where we run preclinical studies and phase I trials with immunotherapy in various types of cancers. Current research has been testing vaccines in numerous numbers of cancers, not just melanoma, such as leukemias, pancreatic, breast, ovarian, and non-small cell lung cancers, just to name a few. In some cancers, such as pancreatic cancer, the body already has all the antigens it needs to kill the cancer, but the tumor environment is immunosupressive, allowing for cancerous cells to escape immunosurveillance. The point of many of these vaccines is to overcome this. Secondly, the vaccine discussed here is only one type of vaccine. It involves performing a leukapheresis to collect immune cells, then, most often pulsing dentritic cells with tumor associated antigens with the hope of these stimulated antigen-presenting cells leading to stimulation of helper and cytotoxic T cells, part of your cell specific immune defense, against the antigen on your cancer cell, killing the cancer cells. Like I said, this is only one type, and there are many others, many which are a series of infusions. TNFerade™, OncoVEX GM-CSF, MORAb-009, SS1P/SS1(dsFv)PE38 are very few examples of which that use different strategies for the same purpose. Of course this gets much more complicated and is a huge simplification...but come on Popular Science, do your homework before writing things. Reading a introduction paragraph on cancer vaccines could have told you this.