Cellular therapy to control tumor progression

The term 'cellular immunotherapy to control tumor progression' summarizes the dream of generations of investigators who ideally want to target cancer by the most natural way, namely the immune system itself. A variety of different approaches have been published with emphasis on the use of T cells in adoptive immunotherapy. Therefore, we focused our review of the literature on T cells to control tumor progression.

Adoptive T cellular immunotherapy of malignant disease has been used for many different malignancies in a broad variety of different clinical settings and experimental approaches. Regarding currently available data, adoptive immunotherapy is particularly effective in hematological disorders and especially after allogeneic stem cell transplantation in the context of the graft-versus-tumor effect. One major problem of immunotherapy for solid tumors might be represented by an inadequate homing of specific cells to tumor tissue and further T-cell inhibitory function of tumor stroma. An optimization of tumor homing/invasion will be a prerequisite for the successful application of adoptive T-cell transfer in solid tumors to reach effects comparable to tumor-specific immune responses following allogeneic stem cell transplantation (graft-versus-tumor reactions).

In this review, we tried to present the most recent findings concerning the use of T cells in adoptive immunotherapy of malignant disease. Furthermore, we discuss some of the main problems of this therapeutic approach, which have evolved from both basic research and clinical experience over the last few years and which might represent the basics to optimize adoptive immunotherapy.