Immunotherapy for cancer has remained in the experimental stage for more than a century. This lengthy duration reflects as much the scope of failures in the area as it does the continuous and remarkable expansion of the understanding of immune responses and host-tumor interaction. Immunotherapy for cancer largely has focused on immunization with peptides or whole antigens, intact tumor cells, or dendritic cells pulsed with antigenic peptides isolated from cancers. Several potential vaccines have been evaluated for the treatment of patients with renal cell cancer. They include heat-shock protein-peptide complex-96, attenuated modified vaccinia Ankara virus encoding 5T4 tumor-associated antigen, dendritic cell pulsed with tumor lysate, dendritic cell-tumor cell hybrid, and irradiated tumor cells admixed with adjuvants. Promising results were obtained in clinical trials, but issues of tumor immunosuppression and lack of identified tumor-associated antigens must be addressed before vaccine therapy can be applied successfully in advanced renal cell cancer.