Revisiting of cancer vaccine?—specific immunotherapy comes to field with the biomarker

Coley et al., advocated a hypothesis of immune response against malignant tumors and he applied his concept by providing patients with the first cancer immunotherapy in 1906 (1). A few decades later, Bacillus Calmette-Guerin was introduced as a tumor immunotherapy by Old et al. (2). These non-specific immunotherapies have been promising cancer therapies, however, they were not widely accepted because of the unstable efficacy and a lack of understanding of the mechanisms of action. After understanding tumor-associated antigens and after discovering dendritic cells, the cancer immunotherapies primarily studied were specific cancer immunotherapies, such as cancer vaccines and dendritic cell vaccines.