This year’s Asco contained much positive news about cancer vaccines, injecting a well needed boost of confidence into a space that suffered a number of high profile set backs last year.

The field is certainly diverse, ranging from complex personalised approaches like Accentia Biopharmaceuticals’ BiovaxID which received a huge amount of attention after being chosen for presentation at the conference’s plenary session, to more straightforward techniques like Merck KGaA’s Stimuvax, which reported highly encouraging phase II results. Despite this progress cancer vaccines are still far from reaching their potential, and researchers at the conferences stressed that further work must be done on boosting effectiveness, and said finding subsets of patients who will benefit the most must be a focus.