Unlike most vaccines, including the HPV vaccine meant to prevent cervical cancer, this is not prophylactic, it's not meant to prevent cancer. Rather, it's a therapy to get rid of cancer once you have it by targeting your immune system towards cancer cells.
Many (most?) cancers have some degree of immune system involvement. In early stages of cancer, the immune system often attacks tumor cells. In later stages of cancer, tumor cells can evolve the behavior of secreting signals to attract the type of immune cells that can support the tumor by doing things such as promoting blood vessel growth. We know a lot about the immune system, and I would venture that we understand more of the immune system's complexity than any other system in the body, but we still don't know all the dynamics. For example, we know the development pathways from blood stem cell to differentiated immune cells, but not all the key factors, or how to push it just this way or that.
This is not the first cancer vaccine, but it is an interesting new way to attempt to reprogram the immune system.
"I would venture that we understand more of the immune system's complexity than any other system in the body"
NO - this is a completely and profoundly FALSE statement.
We have learned quite a bit about the immune system in the past decade or so but it is still one of the most mysterious systems in the entire body. The immune system is a black box from the standpoint of most clinicians today. It's an _incredibly_ overwhelming and complex system with dozens of interacting cell types and different molecules spewing into our bloodstream; with each of those cells containing tens of thousands of genes whose activity is dependent upon dozens of factors.
So it is far from being understood. But the research and technology is promising. Immunologists today still perform the same tests they did in the 1960s outside of advanced and experimental immune studies done at the university level.
Your generic explanation of cancers is also incredibly incorrect.
You seem to be mistaken, and responding to something I did not write. I did not say that we understand its complexity, I said that we understand more of it's complexity than any other body system. The depth and complexity of immunology as a field is evidence of that. My point was that despite having advanced our knowledge here more than in other parts of molecular biology, we still can't control it. What do see as incorrect in those statements?
Also if you don't know about immune involvement in cancers, I'd recommend catching up with the past decade. I pointed out two of the ten Hanahan & Weinberg hallmarks of cancer, so this isn't exactly old news.
Many (most?) cancers have some degree of immune system involvement. In early stages of cancer, the immune system often attacks tumor cells. In later stages of cancer, tumor cells can evolve the behavior of secreting signals to attract the type of immune cells that can support the tumor by doing things such as promoting blood vessel growth. We know a lot about the immune system, and I would venture that we understand more of the immune system's complexity than any other system in the body, but we still don't know all the dynamics. For example, we know the development pathways from blood stem cell to differentiated immune cells, but not all the key factors, or how to push it just this way or that.
This is not the first cancer vaccine, but it is an interesting new way to attempt to reprogram the immune system.