Vaccines Stage A Comeback

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Researchers are heartened by their preliminary success with a more complicated regimen, in which inoculations are custom-made from--and for--each patient. Early in 2001, scientists from Stanford University reported some shrinkage of advanced colon or lung tumors in half of a dozen patients. The vaccines they used were made of dendritic cells harvested from the patients themselves and mixed with a protein found on colon and lung tumors. These were then put back into the patients. "Our hope is to make these vaccines more potent and to try them in earlier-stage disease, possibly even using them to prevent disease," says the lead researcher, Dr. Lawrence Fong.

And that's undoubtedly only the beginning. Just a decade ago, medical science despaired of ever finding vaccines that would be able to ward off illnesses like malaria and tuberculosis, which have plagued humanity for thousands of years, and AIDS, which looked as though it might turn out to be even deadlier than these ancient killers. The notion that this venerable disease-prevention strategy would prove effective against these and others seemed farfetched.

Now it's clear that the age of vaccines was proclaimed over much too soon. Some of the new inoculations now under development won't pan out, of course. But doctors have learned their lesson, and if history is any guide, it's a happy one: any statement about the limits of vaccinations has a good chance of being proved wrong--and sooner than anyone expects.