Cancer vaccine is a vaccine that either treats existing cancer or prevents development of a cancer. One approach to cancer vaccination is to separate proteins from cancer cells and immunize patients against those proteins, in the hope of stimulating the immune system to kill the cancer cells. Research on cancer vaccines is underway for treatment of breast, lung, colon, skin, kidney, prostate and other cancers. Another approach is to generate an immune response in situ in the patient using oncolytic viruses. This approach was used in the drug talimogene laherparepvec, a version of herpes simplex virus engineered to selectively replicate in tumor tissue and to express the immune stimulatory protein GM-CSF. This enhances the anti-tumor immune response to tumor antigens released following viral lysis and provides a patient-specific vaccine. A vaccine against a particular virus is relatively easy to create. The virus is foreign to the body, and therefore expresses antigens that the immune system can recognize. Furthermore, viruses usually only provide a few viable variants. By contrast, developing vaccines for viruses that mutate constantly such as influenza or HIV has been problematic. The development of cancer vaccine still has a long way to go.
In the present book, fifteen typical literatures about cancer vaccine published on international authoritative journals were selected to introduce the worldwide newest progress, which contains reviews or original researches on medical science, vaccination, virology, immunology, ect. We hope this book can demonstrate advances in cancer vaccine as well as give references to the researchers, students and other related people.