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Comment by forgotpwagain | Hacker News Reader

The method by which vaccinations work is immunological. I think the most exciting frontier in cancer biology is prophylactic (preventative) vaccination. If we are able to develop effective vaccines against cancers, that will very much change the game.

This is currently a research frontiers area--but in 10-20 years, I believe that we will have made significant inroads on it.

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Since every cancer is different in the markers it displays, I think that is unlikely to happen. It would mean an insane amount of vaccinations and the assumption that they have none to acceptable side effects.

Not to mention the risk for an auto-immune complication... because the cancer is just slightly different from "self", any immune response will have a very high risk for auto-immune recognition.

That's why CAR-T treatments are considered only in the cases where all other options have been exhausted.

Sure--you won't be able to get every tumor. But there are certain markers that are more common than others, so if you can get the top ~10 done within reasonable measures of safety, you could prevent a nontrivial number of cancers.

There are a handful of embryonic proteins that are normally expressed during development but are absent in the adult that are particularly promising. One of the hallmarks of cancer is dedifferentiation--losing specific markers and function and looking more and more like a stem cell that can continue to replicate, and these embryonic proteins are known to be reexpressed in many tumors.

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