[Cancer Immunoediting in the Development of Cancer Immunotherapy]

Cancer immunotherapy has become a new entity of cancer treatment with successes in various clinical trials. Immune checkpoint inhibitors, particularly targeting PD-1 and CTLA-4 show an efficient antitumor effect via reinvigorating antitumor immune responses which are generally suppressed in the tumor microenvironment, resulting in the approval for the treatment of multiple cancer types including malignant melanoma, lung cancer, gastric cancer and so on. The hypothesis called "cancer immunoediting is an important concept in the current cancer immunotherapy. Based on the hypothesis, the immune system not only destroys cancer cells, but also selects less immunogenic cancer cells accompanied with the development of the immune suppressive tumor microenvironment. Therefore, in addition to immune checkpoint inhibitors, various promising cancer immunotherapies such as adoptive T-cell transfer and CAR-T therapy and combination immunotherapies are under intense scrutiny. Here, we focus on the cancer immunoediting hypothesis to understand the current and future cancer immunotherapies.