SEREX serological analysis of cDNA expression library
With this method you want to identify proteins on cancer cells which are immunogenic so you can use them to boost an immune response against the cancer cells.

To do so, you extract the complete mRNA from a cancer. These mRNAs represent all the genes which this cancers expresses (which then also contains the immunogenic proteins). These mRNAs are cloned into bacteriophages (viruses that only infect bacteria) and are then used to infect bacteria. During this infection the virus expresses the protein which has been cloned into his sequence and which originates from the cancer cell. The infection of the bacteria leads to the formation of plaques (wholes) in the bacteria which grow on the surface of a culture plate. 

You then use the serum of cancer patients on these expressed proteins to see, if there are antibodies which can recognize these cancer antigens (and could be used to detect and mark them). If there are proteins which only react to the sera of cancer patients but not to controls (to exclude) unspecific reactions, then these proteins are identified and can be used to generate antibodies against this specific cancer type. It works like in the figure below (from this paper):