Description

Traditional cancer drugs are cytotoxic agents, meaning that they kill cells. Although most chemotherapeutics preferentially affect rapidly dividing cells (i.e., cancer cells) they can not differentiate between malignant and normal cells. The unavoidable toxicity to normal cells often results in treatment-related toxicities such as increased susceptibility to bleeding and infection, mucositis, nausea and vomiting, hair loss, etc. This nonspecific approach to cancer treatment makes it more suitable for use in disease settings in which the tumor burden is high, such as advanced or metastatic disease. This article covers therapeutic cancer vaccines which belong to a newer class of targeted cancer therapies. Like innovative treatments such as Gleevec Herceptin. Most cancer vaccines in development are designed to attack only malignant cells. By targeting tumor cells with high specificity, this new class of treatments tends to be associated with less toxicity compared with traditional cancer drugs. Despite the varied approaches employed by the many therapeutic cancer vaccines in development, they all share one fundamental goal: to program a patient’s immune system to attack the patient’s cancer. Some vaccines utilize antigens (any substance capable of stimulating an immune response) that are known to be associated with certain types of tumors. In recent years, there was an increased interest on so-called unique antigens that are products of random mutations arising in the course of tumor cells’ uncontrolled cell divisions. These led researchers’ interest and work on personalized cancer vaccines that use the patients’ own tumor cells to generate immune response specific to the patients’ own cancers.