ANDRZEJ KRAUZE
Imagine having the ability to eliminate a disease—not just to alleviate its symptoms, but to erase it completely, as if it had never existed. This is the promise of vaccines.
It was this idea that lured me, as an undergraduate, into the field of immunology. A few years after my grandmother had died of melanoma, I was browsing in the library stacks when I came across a research article discussing a vaccine-based therapy for the cancer. The concept gave me pause. I had only known vaccines in the context of the dreaded childhood shots. Yet here, the authors presented the idea of tweaking vaccination so that the immune system might reject cancer in much the same way that it clears an infection.
Cancer vaccines still ...
