Era of cancer immunotherapy has come

Abstract

The dramatic and long durable anti-tumor effect of immune checkpoint blockade, such as anti-CTLA-4 Ab, anti-PD-1 Ab, and anti-PD-L1 Ab was surprised the world. In addition, CAR-T cell therapy that target the CD19 indicates a very high response rate to the CD19-positive hematologic malignancies. Now, no one doubts the presence of immunity against cancer. Further, accordingly, tumor-specific neoantigen are attention now, the clinical trials of individualized peptide vaccination that target patient individual neoantigens has begun in the Western. On the other hand, the peptide vaccine therapy that target common self-antigen is not yet been approved in Japan, the development is struggling. In this paper, I overview the cancer immunotherapy and neoantigen and introduce some development of cancer immunotherapy in Japan.