“What would it take to develop a cancer vaccine?”
I come from a family where there are a number of cancer cases. This has left me extremely worried. I know there aren't really any vaccines to prevent cancer, but I'm just curious as to why.
2 Answers
This is an important question. One problem is that all cancers are different. One facet of vaccine development is the discovery of genetic abnormalities that are identical in all or the majority of cases. This would allow scientists to stimulate the immune system to eliminate abnormalities as they appear in microscopic quantities of cells. This unfortunately is not the situation with cancer. Cells in this situation develop different mutations that cause uncontrolled growth. Each type of cancer is unique. Hopefully some day there will be a genetic analysis developed that will allow us to develop drugs or immune cells specific for the cancer in question.
Think of cancers as having millions of different and changing faces. You can only attack "some". This is the problem with cancer vaccines. We are working on them. We've had to use different methods. For example, the HPV virus is thought to be the cause of Cervical cancer in women. So, we do have a vaccine for Cervical cancer and we do this by preventing the HPV Virus (one face)
