Vaccines are used to boost immunity for the body to help heal itself against disease. Typically, vaccines contain a weakened form of the disease-causing organism. Once it enters the body it will trigger the immune system to recognize it as foreign, destroy it, and repeat the process the next time it enters the body. For patients with prostate cancer, one way of creating a vaccine is to take white blood cells from the patient and expose them to prostate cancer cells in a lab before administering them back into the patient’s system. Preventive vaccines are being studied to help prevent cancer, while treatment vaccines are currently being used to strengthen the natural defenses of prostate cancer patients to treat the disease.
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