Breast cancer tumour vaccines

As the millennium approaches, one might think that there is little cause for enthusiasm regarding the prospects for potential immunological therapies in breast
cancer. It has been assumed that modulating the immune response to tumours
is most likely to be effective in the setting of minimal residual disease yet non-specific
immunotherapy approaches were not associated with any attributable survival
benefit in the adjuvant setting in the Early Breast Cancer Trialist Group overview.
It should also be remembered that patients who are immunosuppressed for long
periods of time, either in the context of organ transplantation or immune deficiency
syndromes often develop virally-induced cancers such as lymphomas or cutaneous
neoplasms and not the more common epithelial malignancies such as breast,
bowel or ovarian cancer. As our understanding of the immune response to novel
antigens increases as well as defining at the molecular level, antigenic changes
associated with malignancy, the prospects for inducing more potent and more
specific immune responses to human cancers are improving.