Immunotherapy with autologous tumor cell vaccines for treatment of occult disease in early stage colon cancer.

At the cellular level it is clear that cancer is a genetic disease arising as a clone that expands and grows in an unregulated manner. While it has always been presumed that neoplasia is a consequence of somatic cell mutations, only in the last few years has the magnitude and diversity of these mutations been elucidated by modern DNA sequencing technology. Immunotherapy is the premier biological approach to targeted therapy. Target therapies require targets. In this case the targets are tumor specific or associated antigens, the proteins expressed from these somatic cell mutations. While the immunotherapeutic approach to eliminating cancer was launched with the assumption that cancer cells were homogeneous, the recent genomic understanding of tumor cells indicates that there is both inter- and intra-tumoral heterogeneity. This presentation will discuss the consequences of this new knowledge of tumor cell biology to the immunotherapeutic approach to treating cancer.