Abstract
The power of cancer immune surveillance has been documented beyond doubt, and the successful exploitation of immune response to cancer has started a new era in the war against cancer. Cancer biologists have recognized immunoevasion as an emerging hallmark in addition to the six hallmarks of cancer. Besides the natural connection between the immune system and cancer development, most established environmental risk factors are now known to interfere with immune surveillance mechanisms. Genetic variations regulating immunity may also modulate cancer susceptibility, but evidence for this is currently limited. Molecular cross talk linking “immune” and “genomic” surveillance pathways has been characterized. It appears that immune mechanisms may contribute to the effects of common cancer risk factors. We provide an updated overview of evidence for cancer immune surveillance, cancer risk factors interfering with it, and interventions to enhance cancer immune surveillance as tools to complement ongoing vaccine development efforts for cancer immunoprevention. Although there is a lot of support for cancer immunoprevention with simple lifestyle modifications from observational studies, there is an urgent need for clinical trials to establish the effectiveness of this approach for public health benefits.
Highlights
Cancer is a major global public health issue
Cancer prevention may benefit from the advances in cancer immunotherapy, which has led to the wider acceptance of the original idea of cancer immune surveillance
Given the prominent effect of immunotherapy in cancer treatment, and increasingly more widely accepted notion of cancer immune surveillance in cancer prevention [12,13,14], we explored potential connections between general cancer risk factors and immune capacity to examine
Summary
Besides the natural connection between the immune system and cancer development, most established environmental risk factors are known to interfere with immune surveillance mechanisms. Molecular cross talk linking “immune” and “genomic” surveillance pathways has been characterized. It appears that immune mechanisms may contribute to the effects of common cancer risk factors. We provide an updated overview of evidence for cancer immune surveillance, cancer risk factors interfering with it, and interventions to enhance cancer immune surveillance as tools to complement ongoing vaccine development efforts for cancer immunoprevention. There is a lot of support for cancer immunoprevention with simple lifestyle modifications from observational studies, there is an urgent need for clinical trials to establish the effectiveness of this approach for public health benefits
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