Abstract: Cancer is the second leading cause of death globally. Some tumors are refractory to conventional therapies such as surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy, but can be controlled by using cancer vaccines to stimulate the body's immune response. The use of vaccines for preventing infections by oncogenic viruses such as hepatitis B virus (HBV) and human papilloma virus (HPV) has been extremely successful in reducing the incidence of cancers caused by these infections. Therapeutic cancer vaccines have brought great hope to people since the beginning of immunotherapy. Although there have been some successes in the clinical trials of therapeutic cancer vaccines and one cancer vaccine for the treatment of prostate cancer has been approved, most of them are still under clinical development. In order to understand the current status of international development and research of therapeutic cancer vaccines, 3 antigen (protein, peptide) vaccines, 3 tumor cell (autologous, allogenic) vaccines, 6 dendritic cell (DC) vaccines, 5 nucleic acid (DNA, RNA, viral vector) vaccines and 2 others that have entered phase Ⅲ clinical trial were mainly analyzed and reviewed according to the data from reports issued by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), Clinicaltrials.gov and other related new drug databases. The analytical results indicated that many of the 19 thereapeutic cancer vaccines, according to their interim analysis reports, showed promising prospects in terms of prolonging relapse-free survival (RFS) and overall survival (OS) as well as tolerability and safety.