What about a cancer vaccine?

There's been a lot of talk in the last month about the idea of a targeted vaccine for cancer — either a therapeutic vaccine, to cure existing tumors, or a prophylactic one. The idea of triggering your own immune system to fight cancer is an exciting one.

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But Agus says that we've been trying to create vaccines for cancer for a hundred years, "and it has yet to work." Unlike smallpox, where there were patients who were cured on their own, "there are no patients with advanced metastatic tumors who have them go away on their own." So the idea of a vaccine "goes against a hundred years of history." Image: Anti-Cancer Antibodies, via Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

But actually, some renal cancers do have a spontaneous rate of remission, notes A. Oliver Sartor, Laborde Professor of Cancer Research at Tulane University, whom I had coffee with the other day. And there is a compelling reason to believe that one day the immune system could be triggered to attack some cancers — and that's the fact that some cancers only affect people whose immune systems are already compromised.

The obvious example of this is people with AIDS, who develop Kaposi's Sarcomas. If you restore their immune systems, "the Kaposi's will melt away," notes Sartor. Also, people who have been on immunosuppressive drugs following an organ transplant are more at risk for certain cancers, and if you can restore the immune system, the cancers tend to be reduced.

Finally, Sartor points to the success of therapies like Interleukin and Provenge, which rely on the immune system to attack leukemia and prostate cancer, respectively.