Cellular therapy to treat haematological and other malignancies: progress and pitfalls

The recent Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of a cellular therapy to treat castration resistant prostate cancer has reinforced the potential of cellular therapy to consolidate current pharmacological approaches to treating cancer. The emergence of the cell manufacturing facility to facilitate clinical translation of these new methodologies allows greater access to these novel therapies. Here we review different strategies currently being explored to treat haematological malignancies with a focus on adoptive allogeneic or autologous transfer of antigen specific T cells, NK cells or dendritic cells. These approaches all aim to generate immunological responses against overexpressed tissue antigens, mismatched minor histocompatability antigens or tumour associated antigens. Current successes and limitations of these different approaches will be discussed with an emphasis on challenges encountered in generating long term engraftment, antigen selection and implementation as well as therapeutic immune monitoring of clinical responses, with examples from recent clinical trials.