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mayonnace t1_iv5v15z wrote

Reply to comment by Med_vs_Pretty_Huge in Could a blood transfusion spread cancer to another person? by SnooRegrets2663

I see. Thank you for the explanation.

I remember people talking about personalized drugs for cancer in past, which wouldn't have the problems of infection or immune response, but I'm guessing that would be extremely expensive.

Perhaps the researchers can find a way to target all sorts of cancer cells, and somehow develop a vaccine, so the immune system itself can cleanse any possible cancer. They can't even find a general vaccine for flu though. So, I don't have much hope. May be if they could target cells with something other than their outer surface... But they must have already been thinking about it. Hard stuff.

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Med_vs_Pretty_Huge t1_iv7f9j1 wrote

Your intuition and comparison to flu is correct. The genome of flu is miniscule and yet it mutates enough every year to render prior vaccines and infections less effective. "Cancer" is hundreds or thousands of different diseases with different mutations etc. It will be a marvel when market approval comes for a vaccine that eliminates a single type of cancer (e.g. a melanoma "vaccine"). A universal cancer vaccine will likely never happen. It's like having a single vaccine for every virus and bacteria on the planet.

Internal antigens are certainly investigated but yes, they are harder because they will only be exposed to the immune system in small pieces on MHC class 1 molecules and thus it can be even harder to differentiate tumor from normal. The checkpoint inhibitors enhance the immune system's ability to do this to an extent but they are non-specific boosters of immune function and can result in life-threatening autoimmune disease.

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