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Anti-cancer vaccines emerging

Long envisioned drugs to harness the immune system could reshape treatments

By Karen Weintraub

 |  Globe Correspondent  

  December 19, 2011

For more than a century, doctors and patients have dreamed of using the body’s own defenses to fight cancer. Why, they wondered, can’t the immune system - so good at tracking down and destroying intruders - attack the tumor cells that invade healthy tissue? Finally, science is catching up with this vision. Just reaching the market in a big way, so-called therapeutic vaccines turn a patient’s immune system against the cancer that is growing inside them.

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