Who could you even administer a cancer vaccine to, though
this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2026
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Cancer vaccines aren’t what you usually have with vaccines. It’s not to prevent you from getting cancer. Instead you give the immune system a target to attack, as the main issue with cancer is, that your immune system can’t fight/see it due to evasion mechanisms.
My uneducated only reading your comment hot take is that it seems like a way to accidentally give yourself an autoimmune disease... But I guess if you already have cancer that might not be too big of a worry.
The only difference is that your making your immune system target just those cancer cells and nothing else. It's extremely specific. Also it has to be because you and I are currently breeding our own unique cancers with no known vaccines.
The trick is to find something that uniquely identifies the cancer cells and tell the immune system to attack that. If it says "attack everyone in a red shirt" but some normal liver cells have a red shirt, then you got a problem. But if only the cancer cells are wearing khakis, then you just identify that. It's the same principle as normal vaccines except that for cancers there's no single identifying trait for all people getting the cancer (even if it's the same type). For a virus it has the exact same trait across everyone who catches it until the virus itself mutates (which is why the flu gets a new vaccine each year to fight the most common mutation).