Question: how far are we from creating a vaccination from cancer?

Alex Haragan answered on 4 Jun 2018:

That’s a good question.

And a difficult one to answer.
The term “cancer” refers to many hundreds of different kinds of cancer. Even when you say something like “Lung cancer” there are actually many different types of lung cancer, many of which behave and act very differently to each other.
A vaccine, as you are aware, is about preventing a disease. So far they have been almost all about stopping some sort of infection (with smallpox being the first, and ebola being one of the most recent).
An infection is a relatively easy thing to create a vaccine for – a specific disease is caused by a specific thing, like a virus or bacteria, so you know exactly what causes the disease and therefore exactly what you need to stop.
Cancer is very different – there are so many reasons why it can happen. Sometimes it seems to be down to things we come into contact with – like smoking or certain viruses, and other-times it just seems to be random.
However, the common feature of cancer is that cancer cells divide without any control over it. In other words, a specific set of genetic mutations have occurred.
That is almost impossible to create a vaccine against because everything from being in the sun to certain foods, to sheer bad luck seem to be responsible for cancer.
The closest I can imagine to a vaccine is a way in which we can continuously regulate the genetic code of our cells back to a known, safe code. I can safely say we are decades if not centuries away from that sort of thing!
However – prevention is still the best cure, and where we do have specific causes we can do something about it. So sunlight can cause skin cancer – so you should wear suncream on a sunny day. Smoking causes lung (and other) cancers, so don’t smoke. Even certain viruses can cause cancer. You will know about (or you might have had) the vaccine against cervical cancer. This is against specific viruses that cause a specific cancer, and it does work fairly well. However, most cancers don’t appear to be caused by viruses, and most have many causes we don’t understand, so, in short, it may be possible, but a general vaccine for cancer is the stuff of star-trek medicine – we are a long long way from that!