Cancer immunotherapy: Overview in brief

Abstract

Within the recent years, the indispensable contribution of immune responses and inflammation during control and progression of malignant diseases has become apparent and a focus of scientific investigation, revealing new insights into the highly complex cellular and molecular mechanisms determining the fate of tumor-driven and tumor specific immune responses in individual patients. On this basis, cancer immunotherapy has been provided with a broad variety of novel tool and therapeutic strategies that not only allow inducing stronger and better T cell responses but that also allow interfering with regulatory mechanisms within the tumor microenvironment. Exploiting these approaches, cancer immunotherapy has recently provided proof of clinical efficacy for a number of different therapeutic approaches which pave the way towards broader exploration of more advanced strategies combining systemic and local immunologic interventions on different mechanistic levels. Here, respective major strategies of cancer immunotherapy and their future perspectives are introduced and discussed.