Engineering opportunities in cancer immunotherapy.

Area of Science:

• Oncology
• Immunology
• Biotechnology

Background:

• Cancer immunotherapy activates the immune system to target cancer cells, with evolving strategies like vaccines and engineered T cells.
• Despite progress, challenges remain in understanding treatment resistance and personalizing immunotherapy approaches for individual patients.

Purpose of the Study:

• To review technological advances in cancer immunotherapy diagnosis, therapy, and monitoring.
• To highlight challenges and opportunities for immunoengineering in clinical translation.

Main Methods:

• Review of current immunotherapy strategies (vaccines, cell therapy, checkpoint blockade).
• Discussion of technological needs for characterizing tumor immune microenvironment and monitoring patient response.
• Exploration of immunoengineering's role in addressing these needs.

Main Results:

• Recent technological advances facilitate improved diagnosis, therapy, and monitoring in cancer immunotherapy.
• Immunoengineering offers novel approaches to overcome existing challenges in the field.

Conclusions:

• Further technological innovation, particularly in immunoengineering, is crucial for advancing cancer immunotherapy.
• Addressing challenges in predicting treatment response and monitoring patients is key to successful clinical translation.