The particles carry a customized dose of cancer antigens that can provoke a strong immune response against tumors.
A nanoscale particle with a unique structure, developed at MIT, holds potential as a customizable delivery vehicle for personalized cancer vaccines.
My uneducated only reading your comment hot take is that it seems like a way to accidentally give yourself an autoimmune disease… But I guess if you already have cancer that might not be too big of a worry.
The trick is to find something that uniquely identifies the cancer cells and tell the immune system to attack that. If it says “attack everyone in a red shirt” but some normal liver cells have a red shirt, then you got a problem. But if only the cancer cells are wearing khakis, then you just identify that. It’s the same principle as normal vaccines except that for cancers there’s no single identifying trait for all people getting the cancer (even if it’s the same type). For a virus it has the exact same trait across everyone who catches it until the virus itself mutates (which is why the flu gets a new vaccine each year to fight the most common mutation).
The only difference is that your making your immune system target just those cancer cells and nothing else. It’s extremely specific. Also it has to be because you and I are currently breeding our own unique cancers with no known vaccines.