[Immunotherapy of patients with head and neck carcinomas]

The decline of immunity has been reported in head and neck carcinomas in the advanced stage. On the basis of this finding in head and neck carcinomas, additional immunotherapy in curative treatment, i.e., surgical therapy and/or radiation therapy, has been applied for patients with advanced tumors to improve their poor prognosis. Until now, only a few controlled randomized studies have evaluated the clinical efficacy of non-specific immunotherapy, i.e., Ubenimex and OK-432. Each result using these drugs showed that the survival rate in those receiving non-specific immunotherapy was higher than in the control. Cytokines, e.g., IFN-alpha, gamma, TNF-alpha, had immunologically modulating actions on the immunological conditions of patients and on the tumor cells, whereas immunotherapy using these cytokines has not shown a good clinical response, as with clinical administration of IL-2 alone. Furthermore, the clinical results of combined therapy of IL-2 and adoptive immunotherapy for head and neck carcinomas have not been satisfactory. In future, to improve the prognosis in patients with these carcinomas, it is indispensable to develop a new immunotherapy including transfer of cytokine-transfected cells having tumor-immunization ability and capable of inducing cytolytic effector cells in the peritumoral site, and specific antibody therapy against tumor cells.