Heat-Based Tumor Ablation: Role of the Immune Response

The ideal cancer therapy not only induces the death of all localized tumor cells with less damage to surrounding normal tissue, but also activates a systemic antitumor immunity. Heat-based tumor ablation has the potential to be such a treatment as it can minimal-invasively ablate a targeted tumor below the skin surface, and may subsequently augment host antitumor immunity. This chapter primarily introduces increasing pre-clinical and clinical evidence linking antitumor immune response to thermal tumor ablation, and then discusses the potential mechanisms involved in ablation-enhanced host antitumor immunity. The seminal studies performed so far indicate that although it is not possible to make definite conclusions on the connection between thermal ablation and antitumor immune response, it is nonetheless important to conduct extensive studies on the subject in order to elucidate the processes involved.