Department of Immuno-Oncology Therapy
In the past decades, the conventional anti-cancer therapies consist of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy. These measures, indeed provide curative opportunities in many occasions, however, it is not uncommon that advanced cancer may still relapse or have distant metastasis.
In the recent years, cancer immune therapy is becoming another effective anti-cancer strategy. By using patients’ own immunity, anti-cancer immunity can be elicited.
More and more evidences show that different abilities of cancer immune therapy may depend on difference of tumor microenvironments. These tumor microenvironments are composed of cancer cells, tumor infiltrating immune cells, cancer-related fibroblasts, tumor supporting neovasculation system and extracellular matrix. They are protecting cancer from attack of normal immune system, facilitating tumor growth, spreading and metastasis.
Cancer immune therapy includes active and passive manners. Passive immune therapy can be achieved by means of monoclonal antibodies, activated lymphocytes, natural killer cells, or cytokines to augment native anti-cancer immunity. Active immune therapy can be elicited such as tumor vaccination to induce non-specific immune modulation or target specific antigen-antibody effect to attack cancer cells. Recently, cancer immune therapy is under prompt development, such as cancer vaccination, chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells therapy, natural killer cells therapy, and immune checkpoint inhibitors.
Especially the development of immune checkpoint inhibitors has been making a big progress and effective in the applications of many cancer subtypes. For example, use of either CTLA-4 or PD-1 inhibitors are able to prolong survival time in advanced melanoma. As comparing to conventional anti-cancer treatments of chemotherapy or radiation therapy to attacking cancer cells themselves, cancer immune therapy is mainly focus on immune system or tumor microenvironment. Thus, it is postulated that combination of immune therapy to conventional anti-cancer treatments may produce synergistic effect to control advanced malignancies.
Along with the progress of cancer immune therapy, such as checkpoint inhibitors, gene editing CAR T cells, natural killer cells, or neoantigens detected by next generation sequencing techniques, the new era of immunology-oncology has been started. At the present time, although cancer immune therapy may just benefit a substantial portion of cancer patients, it is hoped that by adding cancer immune therapy, and well-designed personalized anti-cancer therapy, more and more advanced malignancies can be controlled efficiently.