Immunotherapy of cancers comes of age

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Cancer immunotherapy has evolved and is aimed at generating the efficacious therapeutic modality to enhance the specificity and power of the immune system to combat tumors.

Areas covered: Current efforts in cancer immunotherapy fall into three main approaches. One approach is through the blockade of immune checkpoints, another approach is through adoptive cellular therapy, and the last approach is through vaccination. The goal of this review is to summarize the current understanding and status of cancer immunotherapy in these three categories.

Expert commentary: We foresee the development of therapeutic protocols combining these approaches with each other or conventional therapies to achieve the most appropriate guideline for management of cancer.

KEYWORDS:

• Cancer immunotherapy
• immune checkpoint blockade
• bispecific antibodies
• adoptive cellular therapy
• chimeric antigen receptors
• dendritic cell
• therapeutic cancer vaccine

Declaration of interest

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

Additional information

Funding

This article was not funded.