Question: Is there a possibility of a cancer vaccine to exist, or a cure to cancer?

Olivia Edwards answered on 8 Jun 2020:

Awesome question!

Cancer describes a really broad range of diseases which can be caused by a lot of different factors, and occur in lots of different areas of the body. This makes it difficult to find one treatment which will cure lots of different types of cancers.

Vaccines are given to people to help prevent infections, and they work by allowing the person to recognise the infectious material and create an immune response against it so that if the person comes into contact with the bacteria or virus they will be able to fight it off much more quickly.

So vaccines for cancer? There are actually vaccines already out there which help prevent some cancers because some cancers are caused by viruses! For example, the human papilloma virus (HPV) is linked to a lot of cases of cervical cancer. Therefore a vaccine against this virus will help prevent people from becoming infected and therefore help prevent this type of cancer from occurring.

There are also vaccines which help fight cancer by helping the immune system to recognise and attack cancer cells. One way this can be done is to take a patients immune cells (white blood cells) and modifying them so they recognise molecules (‘antigens’) which are only expressed on cancer cells. These cells can then be injected back into the patient and will attack the cancer cells expressing these antigens. These types of treatments are called immunotherapy, and there is a lot of research going on to help develop these treatments and make them more effective!