On the nature of cancer and why anticancer vaccines don't work.
In this essay I suggest that the major difficulty in producing effective anti-cancer vaccines lies in the fact that most cancers have little immunogenicity because of a basic paucity of tumor-specific antigenicity. The lack of antigenicity, despite extensive genomic instability, could be explained if most tumor mutations occur in silenced genes. A further problem is that an immune reaction against tumor antigens, especially in moderate or low amount, may be stimulatory rather than inhibitory to tumor growth.
Prehn
Richmond T
RT
Dept of Pathology, University of Washington, 5433 South Hudson Street, Seattle, WA 98118, USA. prehn@u.washington.edu