Question: Do uou think that in the NEAR future there may be a vaccine for cancers such as; lung cancer, or breast cancer? If there will be, how long do you think that this could take?

Helen Fletcher answered on 23 Jun 2011:

i believe that we may very well have anti cancer vaccines that could be given upon diagnosis in the near future (10-20 years) the problem is that different types of cancer are caused by so many different things that I don’t think we will ever have a vaccine that could treat all cancers. All new drugs and vaccines take a very long time to get through safety testing before they can be used by doctors. we already have a preventative vaccine against cervical cancer, that works by stopping girls from getting the virus human papilloma virus that causes cancer cells to form. It will be harder to produce a prophalctic vaccine against lung cancer unless we find that a certain disease causes lung cancer.