Cancer vaccines

This page has information about vaccines to treat cancer. Vaccines are a type of biological therapy. Research in this area is at an early stage and vaccines are mainly available as part of clinical trials.

You can find information about

What vaccines are
Types of cancer vaccines
BCG vaccine for bladder cancer
Vaccine therapy for prostate cancer

Vaccines can help to protect us from infection and the diseases it can cause. But they can also be used to treat and prevent some types of cancer. Vaccines deliver tiny amounts of proteins into the body. Depending on the vaccine, these proteins might come from viruses, bacteria or cancer cells but they are not capable of causing disease.

The body's immune system recognises that the vaccine proteins are different from its own proteins and sets up an attack against them. White blood cells make proteins called antibodies that can recognise particular proteins in the vaccine. The antibodies stick to the vaccine proteins and help to remove them from the body. Some of the antibodies stay in the body though. So if you are exposed to the same proteins again in the future, the body quickly recognises them and starts making the right antibodies straight away. With vaccines against infection, this is enough to prevent the infection altogether.

Cancer vaccines help the immune system to recognise and attack cancer cells.

There are 2 main types of cancer vaccines

Vaccines to prevent cancer
Vaccines to treat cancer

Vaccines to prevent cancer

There is currently only one prevention vaccine available. It can prevent cancer of the neck of the womb (cervix) by protecting against infection with the human papilloma virus (HPV). This virus is known to cause changes that can lead to cancer of the cervix. If women have vaccinations before they have been exposed to the HPV virus, they have a very much lower risk of cervical cancer.

The UK has a programme which offers the cervical cancer vaccine to all girls aged 12 and 13. You can find out more about the HPV vaccine in the question and answer section.

There are many clinical trials under way using vaccines to try to prevent cancers but this is very early research. You can find many of these trials on our clinical trials database.

Vaccines to treat cancer

Vaccines that treat cancer are designed to try and get the immune system to recognise and attack cancer cells. They may

Stop further growth of a cancer
Prevent a cancer from coming back
Destroy any cancer cells left behind after other treatments

This is an exciting area of cancer research. But we need a lot more research before we’ll have a fuller picture of how well this type of treatment works and which cancers it may treat. Scientists are studying many different types of cancer vaccines and they work in different ways. The types most commonly under investigation throughout the world are

These names relate to the way the vaccines are made or how they work. This is very technical and complicated. Most of us don’t need to know all the details of it. If you’d like to know more about them, the links above take you to a brief description of each type of vaccine.

There are some current trials looking at vaccines to treat various types of cancer. To learn about research into cancer vaccines as a treatment, you can look at information about research for specific cancer types. Or you can find research trials on our clinical trials database.

Most people have heard of BCG as a vaccine for tuberculosis (TB). Doctors can also use it as a treatment to help to stop early bladder cancers from coming back in the bladder lining. We don’t know exactly how it works, but it probably encourages immune system cells, which then work against any cancer cells left behind.

You have the treatment into your bladder, through a tube (catheter). This is called intravesical treatment. It tends not to cause many side effects because the BCG vaccine mainly stays inside the bladder.

There is information about BCG treatment in the section about treating bladder cancer.

In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration agency (FDA) has approved a dendritic cell cancer vaccine called sipuleucel T (Provenge). Sipuleucel T is used to treat prostate cancer that has spread. There is a UK trial looking at how well sipuleucel T works for advanced prostate cancer.