Cancer vaccines—it’s a concept seemingly torn from the plot of a futuristic sci-fi movie, or from the pages of some decades-old utopian novel far ahead of its time.
But such wonders of science exist today. And while much work lies ahead, they’ve been preventing cancer and saving lives for more than four decades.
“If you took a poll and asked people, ‘Do we have a vaccine against cancer?’ people would say no,” Karen Knudsen, CEO of the American Cancer Society, tells Fortune.
“They really don’t know that we do.”
Pharma giants BioNTech and Moderna recently made headlines for exploring the potential of mRNA vaccines, first employed with COVID, to treat cancer. Such vaccines use lab-created messengers, of sorts, that teach the body how to mount an immune response.
But clinical trials have long been underway using more traditional vaccine technologies—and participants are already receiving cancer vaccines, many personalized. A handful of vaccines have already received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. And cancer-preventing vaccines have been around since the 1980s.