Gene Therapy for Cancer Treatment

Abstract

Cancer is the second leading cause of death worldwide. It involves an irregular cell development with the possibility to attack or spread to different parts of the body. Available therapies such as surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy have some limitations. The limitations of surgery and radiotherapy are tumor invasion and spread outside the tumor area, while the limitation with chemotherapy is its low therapeutic ratio for most of the drugs. Gene therapy is a therapeutic strategy in which the replacement of a defective gene with a functional or healthy copy of that gene is performed, and it is a potentially beneficial cancer treatment approach, especially over chemotherapy. Gene therapy provides a variety of advantages for the treatment of cancer, including high potency and specificity, low off-target toxicity, and delivery of multiple genes that concurrently target cancer tumorigenesis, recurrence, and drug-resistance compared to conventional treatments. Various gene therapy approaches have been employed for cancer, such as oncolytic therapy, anti-angiogenic gene therapy, gene therapy–based immune modulation, correction of or compensation for defective genes, transductional and transcriptional targeting, gene therapy in combination with radiation therapy, etc. Various antibodies that are tumor specific and genetically modified immune cells and vaccines have also been developed. However, only a few of them are presently available commercially, while many others are still in clinical trials. This chapter provides an overview of gene therapeutics and gene delivery technologies and highlights recent advances, challenges, and insights into the design and the utility of gene therapy for cancer treatment.