The past, present and future of immunotherapy against tumor

Tumor is one of the most common lethal diseases in the world. Current progress of therapy remains insufficient survival benefit. Tumor immunotherapies have been proposed for more than a century. With the improvement in the understanding of the role of the immune system in the tumorigenesis and immune response to tumor, immunotherapy has obtained a rapid development and plays the significant role in tumor therapy nowadays. This review designs to provide a general overview of immunotherapy in tumors. We will introduce the landmark events in the past research of immunotherapy and elaborate a range of strategies using different immune response mechanism, which have been demonstrated successfully and even some of them have been approved by US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to certain tumor therapy. Finally, we will discuss the future direction of immunotherapy so that we can predict the possible and valuable strategies for future tumor therapy.