Cancer vaccine on the way!

A cancer vaccine is a vaccine that either treats existing cancer or prevent development of cancer. Vaccines that treat existing cancer are known as therapeutic cancer vaccines.
Scientists are having extraordinary success treating cancer with new vaccines they believe could be a 'game changer' in the battle against the disease. They have worked out how to teach the body's immune system to identify cancer cells, allowing patients to be primed to destroy cancer. The method involve taking T-cells, which fight infection and giving them the ability to recognise a special tag on the surface of cancer cells, called the WT1 protein.
The research is being carried out on patients with leukaemia but the scientists hope their vaccines will eventually be used to fight many types of cancer, including that of bowel, prostate and breast whose cells tend to have WT1 on their surfaces.
In short term, doctors are looking to see if these super-immune cells will be powerful enough to stop leukaemia patients from relapsing after chemotherapy. But scientists also hope this approach might work to help treat a range of other cancers too.
However, these treatments are still in the early stages of clinical trials and although some people have had great responses, they haven't worked for everyone.