Cancer immunotherapy in progress-an overview of the past 130 years

Hiroaki Ikeda1,2

  • 1Department of Oncology, Nagasaki University Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, 1-12-4, Sakamoto, Nagasaki 852-8523, Japan.

International Immunology
|January 10, 2025
PubMed

Since the first approval of an immune checkpoint inhibitor, we have witnessed the clinical success of cancer immunotherapy. Adoptive T-cell therapy with chimeric antigen receptor T (CAR-T) cells has shown remarkable efficacy in hematological malignancies. Concurrently with these successes, the cancer immunoediting concept that refined the cancer immunosurveillance concept underpinned the scientific mechanism and reason for past failures, as well as recent breakthroughs in cancer immunotherapy. Now, we face the next step of issues to be solved in this field, such as tumor heterogeneity, the tumor microenvironment, the metabolism of tumors and the immune system, and personalized approaches for patients, aiming to expand the population benefitted by the therapies.

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