Ticino Welcome - The Vaccines to Come
What sets a personalized therapeutic cancer vaccine apart from traditional vaccines, and how could it transform cancer treatment?
“Traditional vaccines prevent infectious diseases by teaching the immune system to recognize viruses or bacteria before they make us sick. With cancer, the principle is different: every tumor has its own unique characteristics, and we must first understand them to know which targets to attack.
This is why we talk about therapeutic vaccines: they are developed to treat an existing disease and are tailored to the specific characteristics of each patient’s tumor. In recent years, immunotherapy has revolutionized oncology. Some drugs are able to remove the “brakes” on the immune system, allowing it to attack the tumor more effectively, but they work only in a subset of patients.
Personalized vaccines can complement this mechanism: while immunotherapy unleashes the immune system’s army, the vaccine helps train it, teaching it to recognize cancer cells. They could therefore become a new pillar of cancer care, especially for preventing recurrences after surgery, when very few invisible cancer cells may remain in the body.”
