Immunotherapy for acute myeloid leukemia: The dawn of a new era?

Abstract

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a myeloid malignancy with heterogenous clinical outcome. Deriving from malignant clonal stem cells in bone marrow, AML cells are marked by its complexity of molecular and cytogenetic architecture. While great progress has been made in the understanding of AML, the long-term survival of AML patients is still dismally poor. For a long period of time, the standard treatment is limited to chemotherapy regimens with or without stem cell transplantation, which remains a series of problems need to be solved regarding treatment efficacy. A considerable part of patients is prone to relapse due to residual AML cells even after rigorous traditional therapy. AML patients, especially those who are resistant to chemotherapy or too old to tolerate high-intensity chemotherapy, are in high need of novel targeted therapies. In the recent few years, with a better understanding of how human immune system works in cancer progression, immunotherapy has been a revolutionized way in both solid and liquid malignancies, translating into new clinical strategies from bench to bedside. Increasing efforts are devoted to applying immunotherapeutic approaches to the treatment of AML. This review discusses the most recently available results on immunotherapy for the treatment of AML such as antibody-based therapy, chimeric antigen receptor T cell (CAR-T) therapy, checkpoint inhibition therapy and vaccines approaches.