Cancer immunotherapy and flow cytometry in immunotherapy monitoring

Abstract

Immunotherapy for cancer treatment continues to be developed and various strategies have been carried out including bioengineering. This endeavour requires development of technology, and efforts to find specific and sensitive tools to monitor immune responses during and after therapy. The purpose of this mini-review was to discuss cancer immunotherapy using T cell and immune checkpoint blockade therapy, as well as immunotherapy monitoring methods using flow cytometry (FCM). Bioengineering of T lymphocytes for immunotherapy and immune checkpoint blockades can be combined with nanoparticles as drug delivery carrier against cancer to increase drug distribution to tumor cells, as well as T cell stimulation regulation to reduce autoimmune effects. In addition, T cell engineering can also prevent Host versus Graft alloreactivity in chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell administration. FCM is a monitoring method that is widely used in pre-clinical and clinical cancer immunotherapy studies.