Primary cancer prevention for cancers with no known infectious etiology: Time for a new paradigm

Vaccines developed for hepatitis B and human papilloma virus infections have been very successful in reducing the burden of cancer due to these infections. In the past decade, our understanding of the immunology of cancer has greatly improved and important progress has been made in the use of immunotherapy for several cancers. However, for the majority of cancers, an infectious etiology is either unknown or does not exist. Prostate cancer, for which no infectious etiology is known, is the most common cancer in men in the United States. Here we discuss the rationale for developing a preventive vaccine for prostate cancer, discuss a possible approach for further work in this area and a means of testing the effectiveness of a prostate cancer prevention vaccine in a clinical trial.