Conference Scene: Immunotherapy reaches new milestones in cancer eradication

Biotherapy is widely considered as the fourth treatment modality for patients with cancer, and uses the constantly increasing knowledge in molecular biology, cell biology and immunology. Biotherapy uses naturally occurring biological molecules (e.g., cytokines and antibodies) or works by the manipulation of normal biological mechanisms (controlling or inhibiting tumor growth). Important achievements in anticancer drug development are immunotherapeutic strategies recently approved by the US FDA as well as clinical data of the cancer patients treated in clinical trials. There is a need to expand these novel cancer immunotherapeutic modalities for cancer patients all over the world. To meet that goal, it is essential to spread the information, to summarize the new clinical data and to draw the conclusions from the clinical and preclinical investigations. These frontline tasks can be well advanced by organizing international conferences in this domain in less scientifically developed countries, with a significant tumor burden statistics. Therefore, special efforts were done to organize the 2nd International Cancer Immunotherapy and Immunomonitoring Conference (CITIM-2011) in Hungary.