Adoptive Cellular Therapy: A Therapeutic Reality?

Abstract

The past decade has seen numerous lines of evidence emerging that suggest human malignancies may be sensitive to the effects of cellular immunotherapy. An increasing understanding of the nature of the effector cells and their target antigens is now leading to more focused efforts to harness these responses for therapeutic benefit. However, clinical application has proven more challenging than initially envisaged. Advances in the setting of allogeneic stem cell transplantation now allow attempts to augment both immunological recovery and anti-tumour activity. Some of the most attractive targets here are allospecific rather than truly tumour-specific. Application outside of this setting is based on attempts to delineate further tumour-specific or, increasingly, tumour-selective targets. This review summarizes these developments and highlights some of the issues that remain to be resolved.

Keywords:

• Adoptive cellular therapy
• Immunomodulation
• Stem cell transplantation
• Graft-versus-malignancy
• Graft-versus-host disease