New Targeted Cancer Vaccines Eliminate Tumors and Prevent Recurrence in Mice

Yes, they don't translate in the sense that "works in mice != works in humans". But it's a pretty iterative and gradual process by which we make those discoveries, and the preclinical work is an important first step.

A lot of applied medicine, especially recently around tumor immunology, immune checkpoint inhibitors, and such started with preclinical investigations in mice and then worked towards humans. The models certainly have limitations but they are known by the researchers and either factored into the interpretation of the studies or improved upon to create better models.

(I did liver cancer research in the past, both in clincial trials and pre-clincial work where we tried therapies in mice / developed new mouse models that better replicated the tumor microenvironment for therapies).

Mice are short-lived and cancer-prone, no wonder that the discrepancy between them and humans is big. They even do not get some of the diseases that we do (e.g. the murine models of ALS are pretty useless). But they are cheap, too, which counts.

It is possible that, in the future, a lot of the testing will be done with organs on chips, much closer to actual human tissue. But we don't really have anything more efficient right now.