Cancer vaccines

Vaccines can help to protect us from infection and diseases. But they can also be used to treat some types of cancer and to prevent cancer. Cancer vaccines help the immune system recognise and attack cancer cells.

A vaccine triggers an immune response in the body. White blood cells make proteins called antibodies that can recognise particular proteins in the vaccine, whether these are from a virus, bacteria or cancer cells. If you are exposed to the same proteins again in the future, the body recognises them and starts making the right antibodies immediately. With vaccines against infection, this is enough to prevent the infection altogether.

You can find more information about the immune system in our about cancer section.

There are two main types of cancer vaccines

• Vaccines to prevent cancer
• Vaccines to treat cancer

Vaccines to prevent cancer

One vaccine available aims to prevent cervical cancer. It protects against infection with the human papilloma virus (HPV). This virus is known to cause changes in cervical cells that can lead to cancer. If women are vaccinated before they have been exposed to the HPV virus, they have a very much lower risk of cervical cancer.

This is the only prevention vaccine currently available. The UK has a programme which offers the vaccine to all girls aged 12 and 13. You can find out more about the HPV vaccine in the question and answer section of CancerHelp UK

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

So far, most vaccine therapy research has been as a treatment for melanoma. This is partly because of the lack of successful treatments for advanced melanoma.

To learn more about research into cancer vaccines, you can look at information about research for specific cancer types.

Vaccine therapy is an exciting area of cancer research but is at a very early stage. Only a very small number of people have benefited so far from vaccines. We need a lot more research before we’ll have a fuller picture of how well this type of treatment works.

Scientists are studying many different types of cancer vaccines and they don’t all work in the same way. Those that are most commonly under investigation throughout the world are

• Antigen vaccines
• Whole cell vaccines
• Dendritic cell vaccines
• DNA vaccines
• Anti idiotype vaccines

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.

In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration agency (FDA) have approved a dendritic cell cancer vaccine called sipuleucel T (Provenge). Sipuleucel T is for the treatment of prostate cancer that has spread.

BCG is a vaccine, but it is not a cancer vaccine. It is really a type of biological therapy.

Most people have heard of BCG as a vaccine for tuberculosis (TB). Doctors use it because it is very good at helping to stop early bladder cancers coming back in the bladder. 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. There aren’t too many side effects because the BCG vaccine mainly stays inside the bladder.

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