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Research Focus Area

Cancer Vaccines: Teaching The Body To Remember

How it works

Cancer vaccines work differently than the vaccines most people are familiar with. Unlike preventative vaccines like the flu shot or MMR vaccine, cancer vaccines are therapeutic — built for someone who already has cancer, or is at high risk of it returning after treatment is finished. 

Cancer is difficult for the immune system to recognize because it comes from a patient’s own cells. A vaccine changes that. Scientists sequence a patient’s tumor, identify the mutations that make it genetically distinct, and use those mutations to build a vaccine that points the immune system directly at the cancer cells — like handing it a “wanted” poster. 

The approach can use a patient’s own tumor mutations (a personalized vaccine) or target mutations that show up across many patients, like KRAS (one of the most common cancer-causing mutations). Vaccines can be built using different modalities (mRNA, DNA, or peptides) and innate immune activators to enhance the immune response. They can also be administered via different routes. Each of these approaches has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Why it matters

For decades, cancer vaccines were a promising idea that never delivered. That’s changing — not because of a single breakthrough, but because several separate advances have converged: DNA sequencing precise enough to find a tumor’s mutations, AI that can predict which of those mutations the immune system is most likely to recognize, and growing clinical evidence that the immune system can mount a durable, lasting response.

So far, vaccines have performed best in the adjuvant setting — after surgery, when the goal is to prevent recurrence rather than treat an existing tumor. That’s a real result, but it’s also just a starting point: it tells us where this approach currently works, not that it works everywhere yet. The more interesting long-term application may be combination therapy: using a vaccine alongside cell therapy to extend or stabilize a response that cell therapy alone can’t sustain.

What we’re doing

  • Investigating how cancer vaccines actually work — including open questions about how to select the mutations worth targeting and which vaccine platform performs best for which setting.
  • Studying vaccines as a complement to cell therapy, building on early evidence that the two approaches may reinforce each other rather than compete.
  • Applying AI and computational tools to neoantigen discovery — predicting which mutations are likely to trigger a real immune response, and speeding up the design process.

What’s next

  • Lowering the cost of personalized vaccines, and exploring off-the-shelf approaches that could deliver a personalized response without a fully custom-built product for every patient.
  • Defending the optimal vaccine platform, adjuvant, and route of administration — questions the field hasn’t settled yet.
  • Studying whether vaccines, used earlier or alongside cell therapy, can help prevent recurrence rather than exclusively treating existing disease.