actually, tumors are being immunosurveilled constantly, and when the immune system identifies those cells, it tries very hard to eliminate them. The immune system doesn't know or care that the cells are "foreign", just that the cells have properties, or tags that correlate with properties, that make those cells dangerous.

While I generally agree there will be no single silver bullet technology by which we "cure all cancer" in a general way with little to no side effects, I think it's not inconcievable that improving our ability to identify potentially damaging our cells will contribute a lot to keeping people cancer-free.

And while I also generally agree that cancer is inextricably intertwined with tissue growth, as an existence "proof", cancer has never been observed in naked mole rats; this observation alone is significant.

The significance of the Naked Mole Rat finding is that not only does it not develop cancer, it also has a very long life-span for a rodent (decades).

Wow thanks for commenting, the bit about the naked mole rats is really interesting.

Can you explain the significance of injecting polio into cancer cells? Is it just to make the immune system definitely see that the cell is bad?

The theory is that cancer cells develop a protein barrier that hides their anomaly from the immune system. The polio virus is thought to damage that and the immune system thus starts to recognize them as mutated cells.

For the patients in the 60 minutes special who experienced remission (if you will), they received one injection, then it took over a year for the tumors to go away.

That's not the problem: the problem is "cancer" is not one illness, with one cause. It's a grouping term for literally thousands, and likely millions, of specific variations which result in unique cells which evade normal anti-cancer immunoresponses.

Even if you developed a vaccine which sensitized the immune system to one type of cancer, chances are the "type" would be limited to pretty much just the 1 person you tested it on.