Designing next-generation interleukin immunotherapy: A cytokine-guided framework for precision cancer therapy

Interleukins (ILs) are powerful regulators of anti-tumor immunity, yet their clinical impact in cancer has remained limited despite decades of therapeutic development. Although first-generation cytokines such as IL-2 established proof-of-principle for cytokine-driven cancer immunotherapy, their broader clinical translation was constrained not by insufficient immunostimulatory potency, but by imprecise deployment, including poor receptor selectivity, systemic exposure, and inadequate alignment with tumor immune context. Despite major advances in cytokine engineering, clinical benefit has continued to lag because cytokine deployment remains insufficiently matched to receptor biology, spatial pharmacology, and immune-state architecture. In this Review, we examine how next-generation interleukins, particularly IL-15, IL-21, and IL-10, are redefining cytokine therapy through functionally specialized roles in sustaining cytotoxic persistence, preserving effector competence, and rewiring suppressive immune states. We synthesize emerging strategies in receptor-biased engineering, spatially restricted delivery, and context-matched combination design, and propose a cytokine-guided framework that integrates receptor logic, delivery geometry, immune-state matching, and biomarker-informed deployment. We further argue that the principal barriers to clinical translation are no longer primarily molecular, but translational, including biomarker insufficiency, trial misalignment, tissue-level resistance, and patient heterogeneity. Overall, next-generation interleukins are best understood not as stronger cytokines, but as more precisely deployable immunotherapeutic modules for durable and rational cancer immunotherapy.