guggnichso
Banned
1.) "Cancer" is not a singular disease, intead there's a lot of different dieseases described by that word. While you can have therapeutic vaccines that work against a certain percentage of a specific type of cancer, f.e. against melanoma, those would not work against any other type of cancer or the same type of cancer with another mutation.
See for example in melanoma, we have treatment that specifically works against cells that harbour the BRAF mutation v600e. These tratments are extremely effective, and BRAFv600e could be a very nice antigen to develop a therapeutic vaccine against. Now, the problem is however, that in nearly all patients treated with BRAF v600e drugs, the drug is at first extremely effective, however, within a short time the cancer comes back in full force, this time with a predominant mutation in NRAS, making it immune to the BRAF treatment and even more agressive.
So, what every vaccine like compound we might ever come up with will still be a very individual treatment.
2.) Preventative vaccines against cancer are not preventative vaccines against cancer, but instead preventative vaccines against certain microbes, that might cause cancer as a side effect, i.e. HPV.
What I basically want to say, by calling them vaccines, the general public expects not only a singular shot during childhood to be next to immune against cancer, but they also expect cancer to be a disease that shares a common denominator that we could actually create a vaccine against. This does not work, simply because every different cancer is so heterogenous, hell, even if I would have say lung cancer, I guarantee you that if you would take a metastasis out of my body and look at it on a singular cell basis, you would find hundreds of completely different cells with completely different mutations in that lump, every mutant waiting for something to kill all the others, so it can outgrow them all.
