A special issue on cancer immunotherapy.

Abstract

A century ago, Paul Ehrlich postulated that cancer would be quite common in long-lived organisms if not for the protective effects of immunity. Harnessing the immune system to treat cancer can be traced back to William Coley, a surgeon at Cornell University, who treated cancer patients with live bacteria in 1896. In 1980s, Steven Rosenberg and his colleagues developed adoptive cell therapy (ACT) using tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) for the treatment of melanoma cancer patients1, providing the first direct evidence that the immune system can be manipulated to achieve therapeutic efficacy in cancer treatment. Despite significant progresses made before 2010, many clinical studies were met only with sporadic success, leading to the disbelief in most people that cancer immunotherapy can effectively treat cancer. However, this view of cancer immunotherapy has been completely changed since 2010. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first blood cell-based vaccine for the treatment of patients with metastatic prostate cancer in 2010. In following year, FDA approved the first checkpoint inhibitor drug (anti-cytotoxic lymphocyte antigen-4 (CTLA-4) antibody) for treating metastatic melanoma. Meanwhile, clinical trials using CD19-chimeric antigen receptor (CD19-CAR) and NY-ESO-1-specific T cell receptor (NY-ESO-1 TCR) engineered T cell therapies have also shown promising clinical responses and impressive benefits2,3,4,5. As results, cancer immunotherapy was named as the “Breakthrough of the Year” in 2013 by Science6. Since then, we have witnessed an explosion of the cancer immunotherapy field.